The Counterfeit Cure
by jozette
Summary: Dean's run-in with a siren drives him and Sam apart. Dean's new love interest, Nick, is the symbol of all that he wants, while being Michael's vessel remains the opposite. Nick proves to have an apocalyptic strategy of his own. But Castiel's soft spot for humans born in long-ago Italy may prove the most decisive factor of all in this tale of shifting loyalties.
1. Chapter 1

_A retelling of Season 4 Episode 14: Sex and Violence _

Bobby burst into the motel room. "Where is it? Where's the siren?" His arm wielding the bronze dagger sank down to his side. "Fellas? You don't know what I went through to get this sailor blood, and I was kind of looking forward to slamming it into one of these creatures. Boys?"

Sam and Dean certainly looked the worse for wear, which wasn't that unusual, but something else seemed to have taken a beating besides the Winchesters' hides. Starting with the unusual silence, and the fact that the brothers were looking anywhere but at each other.

"What? This fake FBI agent routine the siren hit upon was pretty smart, so no need to feel bad he had you going. All it took was a phone call to figure it out, though." Bobby clapped Dean on the shoulder and the hunter winced.

"Yeah, Bobby, you're right. We're not used to the things we hunt being so personable, is all. At least I'm not used to getting chummy with the enemy," Dean said. The reflexive accusation hurled at Sam for consorting with the demon Ruby fell flat, even to his own ears.

Sam finally shook himself out of some paralysis that had him stopped where the siren had disappeared. "We don't like anybody pitting us against each other is all, Bobby. We'd rather have a spat on our own account."

Sam put his arm around Dean and helped his brother limp across to his bag so they could hastily pack up, both of them sneaking a glance at the beds with their identical coverlets pulled up.

Bobby was surveying the surroundings with a practiced eye. "Looks like you did more damage to each other than the room. He was relying on those mind tricks they're so good at, I bet."

"You got that right," Sam said resolutely while throwing clothes and weapons in his carryall. "It had a heart to heart with me and I was ready to name my first-born after it. Everybody needs that kind of understanding, and Dean and I don't get to stop and let it all out often enough."

Dean picked up his own packed bag and hissed, grabbing his back. "Thanks, Bobby." He handed the pack off to his uncle. "I think I wrenched something good trying to wriggle away from that thing."

The older man was dying to share how he happened to come upon the solution to the siren that had been mostly inhabiting strippers and inducing men to kill the most important person in their lives. He treated them to a diner meal and a play-by-play of how he acquired the blood of a drowned sailor that was supposedly key to defeating the nearly immortal siren and its hold over any human it had infected. In between, Sam took the lead in filling in on the case and how they had happened to scare the creature off.

"I think it overestimated its ability to get between two brothers," Sam said.

"He, I mean it, could never take the place of Sam," Dean said, following the example of his brother's casual tone. Together, they told their uncle that they'd managed to half snap out of the spell that had both of them convinced that the fake FBI agent was their best friend. A battle had ensued when the two Winchester's fought for exclusive rights to the siren's comradeship.

Dean

There truly was nothing like Sam's brotherly backup, Dean reflected as he shoveled in some pie that tasted off to him.

Sam had seen Dean in flagrante with a guy, and that, more than the fact that the person he'd been all over had technically been something far worse, had the older brother totally freaked. And his younger brother was letting him know in every indirect way he could that the secret would never go any farther than the two of them.

How a hunt that took place mostly in strip clubs could have ended on such a non-heterosexual note, Dean couldn't begin to understand.

The two brothers, well, mostly Dean, had spent a lot of time scrutinizing the ladies gyrating at the poles and serving drinks in the club they'd identified as the most likely hunting ground for the siren. The other FBI agent who insinuated himself into the case had been an annoyance and then a source of manly companionship—first for Sam, who was much less titillated by the scantily clad ladies than Dean.

Why that meant that Dean was also the one to end up doing the horizontal tango with the so-called Agent Nick Monroe, he had no idea.

"Look at that one," Dean indicated a be-tasseled girl in thigh-high boots currently on the stage one day during their investigation.

"I can think of several regulations I'd like to break with her," Agent Monroe said, sipping a beer.

He smiled broadly and Dean smiled back. "This is what I'm always trying to tell my partner. It's okay to enjoy yourself as long as you still get the job done."

"What job was that?" Nick asked sagely, following Dean's attention as it was totally absorbed in a voluptuous redhead in a sailor outfit. He chuckled. "It's okay, man. The job will be here. Go on and take a little time off with the distraction of your choice. That's what partners are for."

Dean's survival instinct kicked in. "Nah. No telling what you'll pick up in a place like this," he said, thinking how much it would suck if he got slathered over with some siren-juice while kissing any pair of those red-painted lips smiling at him from every direction. Except that brunette with the navel ring made him want to make an exception…. He tore himself away with a great effort.

"Shit," Dean swore as he knocked over his beer. His own hunter's instincts had him grabbing the bottle before it rolled off the table, but he was surprised to find his companion's reflexes almost as fast as the other man's hand grazed his.

"You're quick on the uptake. Quantico only lets in the best," Dean laughed easily.

"You have no idea," Agent Monroe agreed, laughing as well.

That must have been the moment Dean was infected. But the veteran hunter, trained to sense when things really went off the rails, had noticed nothing, and that was truly worrisome. It had all seemed so natural.

"I need to hit the head," Dean said a moment later, feeling like drinking that early in the day, though at a slow rate as a method of fitting in among the general debauchery, maybe had been a bad idea.

"Me too," the agent had said, rising and throwing some bills on the table. "Then let's go outside and see if we can scope out the likely targets on the way in. Every man looks the same when you see what he really wants come to the forefront of his eyes."

The piped-in tunes had gotten less strident at some point, so that Dean was able to hear some unexpected music in the other man's voice. Agent Monroe must have gone to college—well, all real FBI agents did. Dean liked listening to the rare smart person who didn't shove their learning down his GED-level throat, and Nick Monroe was proving to be that perfect combination of down-home country (a Carolina boy, the agent had confided in his comfortable drawl) and a sharp investigator. With no awareness of the supernatural whatsoever, the FBI guy had managed to piece together the stripper connection that lay underneath the murders committed by men who exhibited an unusual level of remorse.

Finally they had managed to weave their way to the bathroom and the line moved up to the point that the real agent and the pseudo-agent ended up in the two-stall room together.

With one hand on his fly, Dean stumbled on the way into his stall. "Hey man, take it slow, I got you," Agent Monroe said into his ear. "Are you sick? You don't look like yourself."

The man turned Dean so he could look at himself in the small grubby mirror. Dean saw a man shaking with arousal clinging much more closely than strictly necessary to a larger man whose face was just out of frame. The unprecedented situation made Dean press even more closely into the man to hide an arousal that he couldn't fathom, except that Agent Nick Monroe looked much more gorgeous in the harsh bathroom light than he'd been aware of until that moment.

"It's okay, Dean," Nick said in that crooning voice. "No one will be able to come in here until we've had our moment. We're meant to be, baby."

The agent had scarcely finished these words when Dean launched his mouth upon the lips hovering just above his. They groped and staggered and ended up with Dean pressed against the grimy tiled wall, his head turning back and his mouth still clamped upon the one belonging to the larger man who was grinding in a very businesslike manner into his back.

"No, don't stop. Don't stop," Dean heard himself panting when the man backed up to survey at arm's length the hunter he'd managed to deconstruct in the space of 60 seconds.

"Don't worry, Dean. We can have that always, but I think there's a riot forming on the other side of the door. Do you feel up to taking a whizz on your own, or do you need my help?"

Dean's mouth dropped open, not at the idea of Nick easing him out of his own pants, but that he wanted it so much.

Agent Monroe plunged his tongue in the open mouth once more and then shut Dean's lips with his hands. "I'll be right over here if you need me."

Dean's brain was just capable of handling the task of relieving himself. Soon, Nick had a hand on his back and was propelling the smaller man first through a crowd whose irritated tenor seemed to melt away in their path. Dean looked back and saw the smiling, confident agent and wondered that anyone ever believed that he and Sam were really FBI. This guy was in charge, not a trace of improv. This assurance had Dean's crotch feeling pressure again, and this time he couldn't blame it on needing to take a piss.

The hunter had been steered out of the door and he took deep, grateful breaths of the evening air. "What time is it? I guess I have been drinking for a long time."

Agent Monroe seemed totally sober as he unlocked his car. "Are you coming?" was all he asked of the Dean paralyzed before the car door.

"Almost," Dean could have answered truthfully on the entire ride back to his motel, during which the hotel directions were the only words he could manage with the weight of Nick's hand resting naturally on his thigh.

Meanwhile, the federal agent was talking smoothly about some partner he had somewhere who didn't appreciate his loyalty—that's right, FBI always came partnered up, wonder why the partner wasn't there on this one? Dean couldn't pursue the thought any further because he was much, much, too grateful to have this agent all to himself.

"I take my work real serious—I sign up to back you up, I'll take one for you, that's my philosophy. What about you?" Monroe asked as they pulled into the motel parking lot. "Will you take one for the team?"

The man's beefy hand caressed Dean's hip, who made a move to divest himself of the jeans that were suddenly in the way.

"Easy there, cowboy," the FBI man said. "We've got a lot of time."

Dean walked on jelly legs to the room, which he was vaguely aware would be vacant because Sam was out getting his with a probable siren. "There's no way that whatever this is could be worse than what Sam's doing," Dean gave himself one last reassurance and rushed to take his shirt off.

During the interminable diner meal, Dean sipped his soda and listened to his brother and uncle talk about the likelihood of tracking down the siren to finish it off for good. If he thought that was at all likely, he would be very concerned. But Agent Monroe was neither that easy to hunt, nor was he going to leave Dean alone again.

The guy had promised in the most intimate situation a man could be in.

"Do you know why you let this happen?" Nick said, and Dean knew he meant, other than the fact that the hunter was immobilized by each of their pairs of handcuffs tethering him to the headboard.

Dean shook his head mutely and inched backwards onto the member that was now almost all the way in the space he realized he had been saving for this moment.

"Because we're the same. Because I know you: I know what you need so you don't have to say it," he thrust a little and Dean bit the pillow. "After seeing all the men in that dive checking you out today, I can tell you, it's not because you never had the opportunity." He nipped Dean's shoulder and growled. "What I'm doing is a freaking privilege, that's what it is." Dean couldn't suppress the moan at the idea that others had wanted him, and Nick had watched him being considered as a piece of tail.

"This feels too right for you to not have thought of it many times before. I know a slut when I see one. You took to this like a duck to water," the agent said, driving his point home.

"Yes, more," were the words still coming out of his throat when Sam walked in the door.

The younger Winchester liked a challenging woman. Which may be another way of saying that a taboo-breaking liaison with the demon Ruby was not only an easy line to cross, but also exactly what he needed to get off.

Sam was smart enough to know that the lady doctor he hooked up with was a possible siren candidate. The abstraction Dean often faulted him for had simply decided that the best course of action was to get together with her. This would either eliminate the doctor as a suspect or get him infected with her venom so he could use it to kill her. An affected person's blood was the best source for the poison that the siren was oddly not immune to itself.

The woman doctor also scratched that itch of his that was increasingly inflamed these days now that he was skirting the dark side. Sam rode her with the abandon that the combination of death and the other-than-human allowed him to exhibit.

"You take a lady places," the woman panted to him when they were all scratched up on the floor of her office afterwards.

Not caring very much whether she turned out to be a lady or not, Sam kissed her and extricated himself. "I'm sorry to run, I really am," he stammered as he yanked on his pants. Normally he gave himself a little bit more credit than to leave a woman seconds after having sex with her, but Sam had someplace he had to be:

He needed to see Agent Monroe.

Sam had spent some surveillance time in the car with the genuine FBI article and found him very likable. So likable the hunter felt kind of bad about besmirching the reputation of the guy's profession by his repeated impersonations.

"I might need to go in and tear Dean off of one of the girls if he doesn't check in soon," Sam remarked in the car.

"They usually do this to people, don't they? Partner up exact opposites, I mean," Monroe replied.

"Huh, I don't think of Dean as my opposite, exactly. We get the job done, and he knows me better than anyone else, for better or for worse."

"I mean the FBI puts together id and ego, like you guys," the agent pursued. "They want someone who won't hesitate to take the shot, who will use instinct to get inside the head of a serial-killing monster, like Dean. But you can't claim that he brings the same kind of brainpower to the table."

"Oh," Sam laughed. "We're more complementary than opposites. Dean's instincts are way beyond me, most times. I've learned to go with it."

"And what about your instincts. Does he understand those?" came the quiet question.

And so Sam had found himself talking—not about anything incriminating or overtly supernatural—he was too smart for that. But about the things he couldn't discuss with his brother: how fractured his sense of right and wrong had gotten along the way, and his increasing willingness to take big risks in the face of big danger. He even talked for a long time about the sexual side of his life with Ruby, which Dean would never want to hear about, employing euphemism to discuss that pairing in all its hot-and-wrong fascination.

"Man, sorry I unloaded on you like that," Sam shook himself when he was done, realizing he had been gazing unseeing at the strip club parking lot, almost deserted at that hour. "Guess I had more bottled up than I thought."

"Any time, brother," Agent Monroe had said in a friendly tone. "It's a lonely job, made worse because they teach you not to let anyone, especially your colleagues, know what you really think. I had a good partner, a real partner sometime back that I could talk to like this. Can't seem to gel with whoever they've stuck me with since I lost him, which is why they have me flying solo. They'd never match us up together, for instance," Monroe laughed ruefully. "We're too much alike. But Sam, if you ever feel like listening or talking, I want you to keep in touch. I mean it. The job is ten times tougher when you don't have someone to truly rely upon. I know from bitter experience."

The agent extended his hand, and Sam did think at the time that he met it with his own that they were a great deal alike physically—exactly the same height, big hands, wide shoulders, but lean. They were also more contemplative than the average hunter— or FBI agent, he imagined.

"I'd like that," Sam said, shaking the hand sincerely.

Ever since that moment, Sam had been entertaining various scenarios that would put him on the road next to the sane, reliable Agent Monroe, and leave his needy older brother behind once and for all. Hell, with Nick he stood a much greater chance of figuring out this apocalypse thing. Sam ached to talk about it with someone who had an attention span. Sam also considered that he would have been less willing to bed that random doctor if he hadn't done the whole thing with a voice in his mind, thinking of how he would explain it to his new FBI friend.

The whole experience of taking the doctor across her desk was much more arousing, knowing he could explain what riding the edge of the forbidden was like to someone who wasn't afraid to hear. Sam had the Impala so he rushed from the doctor's office to find the agent where he thought he would be: in another protracted stakeout in front of the strip bar that Sam suddenly cared little about. When neither the agent nor his brother were there, on an impulse Sam drove up to their motel. He was surprised that the fed's car was in the lot.

Feeling an irrational jealousy that Dean had spent all day drooling over exotic dancers next to the only intelligent, trustworthy guy for miles, Sam opened the door.

Some truth that had been the pillar of his life crumpled into something just as quivering as his older brother, who being screwed by a corn-fed specimen of the Bureau's finest.

What happened after that, Sam couldn't be sure. He knew he fought, but wasn't able to discern whether he was trying to get the man to stop sexually assaulting his brother, whom he was sure must have been drugged or beaten into submission. Or if he was furious that his needy older brother had done the unthinkable—putting his ass between Sam and his newfound comrade—in order to stand in the way of Sam finally moving on in his life.

Fists were flying and, in at least two cases, privates were out and bouncing, during what Sam had to admit were an engrossing couple of minutes. "This is what it would be like to go on the road with this Nick," was the thought that kept coming to Sam as he fought with an unusual relish.

"Your partner begged me for it until I felt too bad to refuse," Agent Monroe confided reasonably between blows.

Sam was strangely gratified to find the other man was an equal match in a fight. "That doesn't surprise me for some reason. He's kind of a basket case. You can understand why I'd give anything for a change of scenery."

The agent seemed to understand what he was proposing. "The bureau would actually be glad to pair me off, but I think you're talking freelance. I might not mind, to tell the truth. I'm game, if you're ready to leave Dean."

"I'm already gone, man. This is where we part ways, Dean, sorry," Sam forced himself to look at his older brother, who had never looked more vulnerable in the middle of a fight.

Dean was wailing on whoever he could reach. "No, don't leave me!" he cried, not sure which man he was talking to, or why he his first move hadn't been to grab some pants and some explanation, any explanation, for his being with the guy whose body still had him half-hard even as confused as he was.

Nick Monroe ducked away from a punch from Sam, and whispered in Dean's ear. "Don't worry, baby, I'm not going to leave you. See you later on down the road. Scout's honor."

Agent Nick Monroe disappeared, Sam's left hook follow-up finding nothing to land on, he ended up falling into the dresser.

The two brothers stared at each other, and Sam took it all back. The best kind of companion is someone that you didn't NEED to talk about things with. In the silence, the two brothers established:

They had both been had by the siren

The fact that Dean had actually been HAD was something that could have easily gone the other way, and Sam would have been the naked one; and

The two brothers would take this incident with them to the grave.

Sam picked up Dean's pants from the floor and threw them at his brother. The older Winchester snapped out of his paralysis in time to catch the trousers and scramble into his clothes and shoes while Sam obscured the post-sex rumples on the bedding.

Bobby stepped into the room. "Where is it? Where's the siren?"

The story Sam had woven for their uncle was still echoing in Dean's ears when they stepped into the Impala, the two brothers back on the job together once more. "If I feel light-headed and queasy, you must have gotten a lot more venom than me and feel ten times worse," Sam said in that wonderful, nonchalant tone Dean knew was one-in-a-million in a guy who had just seen you being screwed by a man.

The siren had gotten both of them to renounce the company of their brother for a promise of companionship. He—it, Sam persisted in saying—had them fighting so hard to be first in its affections it had been unprepared for the combined forces of two hunters. "It turned tail and left," Sam concluded. "Sorry for the bother you went through with the sailor blood. We'll keep it on hand the next time we cross paths with the thing."

"You boys must've put up one hell of a catfight," their uncle said as they parted ways. "I suppose they're used to drugging civilians and plucking the low-hanging fruit."

"That we ain't, Bobby," Sam said naturally, his brotherly antennae sensing the well-hidden flinch behind Dean's smile.

But there was no denying it: Dean had been plucked. That much the brothers knew. But forbidden fruit hanging from any altitude had become a new, tantalizing threat—and Dean was alone in sensing this as he slipped into a bruised and tender sleep in the passenger seat.

—

The woman strode across the graveyard, her stiletto-heeled thigh-high boots sinking into the night-moist earth. The only other sound for long moments was the creaking of her pink pleather miniskirt and bustier.

She stopped at the signaled spot with her hand on her hip and tossed her long ponytail impatiently. "I guess I technically do have all the time in the world, theoretically, but I'm missing my turn on the pole for this meeting."

A man stepped out from behind a monument. "Far be it from me to question the methods of such an efficient operative, but I must know—why didn't you use a visage like this to reel him in?"

The woman slid her pink-polished fingers down her body of the evening. It was a bumpy ride. "I don't decide—it's merely me responding to the desire that is already present in them."

"In Hell, everything comes out in the wash, so I know a great deal about what floats Dean Winchester's boat," the man purred. "But still, this is very interesting, topside. And useful. As I'm sure you will find our arrangement—" He unfurled a long scroll. "When Hell does indeed begin to freeze over and things get a bit frosty—" the man's eyes raked down her abundant bare skin, goosebumped in the night air, "especially for more tropical temperaments such a siren's."

"This was surprisingly entertaining; he's more interesting than you sold him as, Crowley," the girl said. "He gave in much faster than I would have thought, but watching his macho self-concept try to wrap itself around my dick—quite enticing. I don't mind riding my way into a privileged spot in the post-apocalyptic world on that ass."

"I told you that you wouldn't regret it," the Hell-operative known as Crowley said, furling up the scroll upon which he had marked off a check for the first installment in the buy-in plan he had set up with the siren. "When the population is decimated by the Croatoan virus and assorted unpleasantness, all of those creatures competing with you on your level of the food chain will find it a dog eat dog world without the soon-to-be overlord's protection." He gave an obsequious bow.

"I'll wait for your word about the next phase then," the siren said, reaching into her cleavage to extract a small compact. By the time she had finished touching up her makeup, the man was gone. She left, her ponytail swinging in anticipation of another evening on the hunt for vulnerable men.

—

Castiel stood at attention as the Archangel Michael listened to a report on his progress.

"Did you expect it to be quite this easy?" Michael asked him, releasing the other angel from his scrutiny.

"Before his trip to Hell, I sense it would have been another matter entirely," Castiel said flatly. "As it stands, it would probably be simple enough to convince Dean to do almost anything, provided it involved some of the self-debasement he believes he deserves. That, packaged with the promise of affection, proved irresistible, as I told you it would."

"Well done, Castiel," Michael said with a rare nod to a lower angel. "With our troops spread so thin, it was inspired of you to find a way to piggy-back on this plan of Hell's that you discovered. This investment of your time in the Winchester man paid off."

"The demons have no idea the favor they are doing us," Castiel replied.

"Continue to monitor the situation, brother, and thanks," the archangel said and left the other angel alone with his thoughts.

Castiel's mind ranged from various types of favors and assorted reasons that they must remain hidden, all of them discovered by close observation of Dean Winchester.


	2. Chapter 2

They were nearly a month out from the unspeakable, and Sam was starting to wonder if it was time to talk about it.

He snuck a glance away from the road and towards Dean, who was staring out the window in silence, as he had for the last couple hundred miles out of Milwaukee.

At first, Dean seemed to be handling his manhandling by a male-bodied siren more in stride than Sam. The younger brother felt like he'd walked in on his roofied brother being date-raped, and the sight was so horrifying his impulse was to suggest counseling. That's what he would do for a female friend who had suffered the same trauma. Bobby had to talk Sam out of going after the thing that did this to his brother, counseling patience rather than going on the offensive just yet.

But Dean quickly grew annoyed at the deferential treatment, and an older brother who snapped at him for no reason felt normal enough to restore Sam's comfort level. That, and Dean getting back in the skirt-chasing game very quickly had helped Sam put aside any lingering concerns after a week or so. After all, Sam had been exposed to the venom too, and he had no special impulses away from his older brother or towards some male confidante.

They hunted. The brothers were pushed around some by angels and demons alike. The only notable difference was that Dean had completely left off any comments about Sam's link with Ruby. "Guess he figured ragging on me for being close to a demon would be too pot calls the kettle a freak, at this point," Sam had chuckled as he enfolded Ruby in his arms at one pit stop. The two brothers fought together better than ever … until Dean started to show signs of coming apart.

Returning to the motel to find his brother slathered in oil and oddly hysterical had been a pretty good indication.

Dean felt something wonderful just around every corner. It would be the fulfillment of the vow the siren whispered in Dean's ear, which was still hot with the promise that they would see each other soon. Except it was going on a month now, and Dean desperately needed to see this person for whom he'd broken his longstanding policy to only fall for people. It was his only hope for figuring out why he'd done it.

And if he was honest with himself, how he could break that taboo more often.

But only that one, only that line, Dean's brain hastened to add—every other line he'd crossed recently would be neatly re-drawn over the smudges his worldview bore after Milwaukee.

It was a regular sewing circle in Dean's head these days, so he leaned against the window and told himself over and over again, "Be brave; you're still a badass motherfucker. That's why the chicks dig you," while forcing himself to piece together exactly what had gone wrong.

He and Sam had spent a couple days in Milwaukee flushing out some poltergeists who had somehow learned to travel from house to house. Pinning down those bitches in one place and then ganking them had been a bitch. That done, naturally Sam and Dean were ready for a little R&R.

Sam was happily left to his own demonic devices doing dark-side yoga or whatever he did with Ruby these days. Meanwhile, Dean was spending every spare minute in strip clubs looking for the siren, and Milwaukee had been no exception. That night, the tired hunter had asked somebody where he could get an eyeful of some exotic dancers, and the guy had said the best sight in town was to be found shimmying on the poles at Pink's.

It took Dean a stupidly long time to realize that the sensation pressing in on him was not the siren he was hoping to see pop out from any corner, preferably dressed as a hot chick from now on. He was being scoped out but good by most of the guys in the joint. Which was a tranny bar, the second thing he was clueless about.

"Dude, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around meeting you in a guy wrapper, but this in-between-the genders stuff is too much," Dean thought to the siren he'd been trying to contact through the bond he felt like a new organ growing within him. If this creature could truly take on any aspect, all Dean had to do was see him—it—again, and the being he'd met as an FBI agent would surely appear like a buxom babe, just the way Dean liked 'em. Last time had been a misunderstanding, that's all, one that he was eager to forget in arms that made him feel equally as horny, but had no inconvenient appendages.

Dean watched the dancers, all of whom were very passable, gyrating to the music while he tried to drink away the feeling that he had this night and every night previous: that his lover was about to reveal herself. He swore under his breath. Actually, tonight might be a bad idea. He'd rather not have the siren show up on the pole and then risk geting hot and heavy with one of these vixens-and-then-some. He had just about attained the right level of lethargy to call it a night, when a voice addressed him from a neighboring table.

"Not your thing, I take it." A guy, a perfectly normal looking guy, was leaning away from his table, which seemed filled with some raucous arty types more intent on crowd-watching than taking in the show.

For a second, Dean's heart leaped. At that moment he didn't care if Nick (or Nicola, as he tried to train himself to think of her) appeared to him as a guy again. He was in need of some maudlin conversation at this late point in the evening. Dean was sure that, siren super-powers aside, what had really happened was two lonely people being shaken out of their respective killing modes to have an honest-to-God real conversation for the first time in forever.

But there was no way this stranger was the being he'd been pining over—he didn't make Dean go weak in the knees. The man said, "You want to join us? These places can get kind of depressing if you look at them through the wrong end of a whiskey or five."

Disappointed, the hunter scooted his chair and drink over to try and forget that this was going to be another no-show night. "Yeah, I wasn't expecting this kind of scene when I asked someone for a good place to take a load off."

"People are people, is my motto. I'm Gerard," the guy said in a warm manner as he introduced the newcomer around the table. Dean's rescuer was a close-cropped redhead, good-looking like everyone at his table, but he was obviously well-dressed. As opposed to his companions, who were wearing the sort of clothes that proclaimed their pricetag with how ragged they were.

All the bohemians' names flew straight out of Dean's head because he was busy thinking, "Except when they're not people," over the next hour or so, as he went through the motions with his new acquaintances. The other folks were much too self-consciously stylish for his taste, but Gerard had an outsider's sense of humor that he turned on his companions and self alike.

"I can see you're trying to do the math, so let me help you," he smiled at Dean. "I'm kind of the honorary normal person for this crowd. They live at an artist's collective not too far away and I'm in finance. I was dating an artist in their colony for a while, but when that ended they decided to keep me and get rid of him. He was a bastard, anyway, and I'll do their taxes."

Dean was glad to have the distraction of someone else's life story without paying too much attention to the details. Then he heard, "I think I have this need for the bizarre because I can't manufacture it on my own."

"Yeah? I got an endless supply of weird for you." And Dean started telling random (sanitized) stories of life on the road with the Winchesters. The part of himself that was always ready with a cover story claimed that he was a folklorist, and he and his brother were traveling around America researching for a book about urban myths. "You'd be surprised the weird shit people cook up. You have to ask the right questions, but almost everybody has had at least one thing happen to them that they can't explain."

By this time, the rest of the table was listening, and Dean felt sort of smart for a change. He sipped his drink and noted how good he felt—more than enjoying the attention from the artsy clique, Dean realized he was totally relieved on another account. He was having a nice conversation with this guy Gerard, a gay guy, along with five or six other gay guys in a tranny club, and he felt absolutely nothing. His hook up with a supernatural creature had left him an intact heterosexual. Thank God. He slugged back the rest of his drink and held up a hand to the waitperson, now in the mood to buy a round.

"Can I get in on the joke?" Gerard was asking him. "That's the first good smile I've seen from you so far."

"I feel like celebrating, that's all," Dean replied, his heart light compared to all the worries of the previous weeks.

"Then I have somewhere special to take you." Gerard waved away the server. "Don't you want to see these gals become gals? In some cases it takes an inch of spackle to see the effect you get on the stage; it's pretty unbelievable." He nodded towards the two dancers, one dressed like an angel, another like a devil, who were slinking around the pole at the moment.

"All right," Dean agreed, reminding himself that under normal circumstances he would be curious, and he'd just established that he was back in the realm of the normal.

He followed Gerard across the bar to the backstage entrance. "It's all right, Maurice, he's with me," the man said to a large bouncer stationed in the way. "They had to post someone there because the most unlikely men kept sneaking back for a peek."

"Why do they let you back here?" Dean asked.

"I do the books for this place." Gerard beckoned him into a dark hallway.

Soon they stepped into an area hung all around with discarded costumes. Several dancers rushed back and forth with headdresses all askew or shouting for some eyelash adhesive. Again, Dean felt very relaxed and sure of himself. This was the sort of story he'd get a lot of mileage out of: Dean Winchester goes backstage at the tranny bar. Sam would be all "I'm not interested" and meanwhile would be hanging on every word.

"Hey, doll-face. I'm free after the show if you'd like a closer look," a husky-voiced figure in a huge Marge Simpson-like wig said, blowing a kiss as she rushed for a costume change.

Oh shit. Except Sam would be breaking out the "our bodies, ourselves" pamphlets like he did after the Incident. Except this time they would be along the lines of, "it's all right to have feelings about other boys." He felt all of his worries rush back in.

But they kept rushing, and rushing. Dean's lost deliciousness was back in full force, and the blood was surging through his body with such a momentum that he had to grab onto the wall. Not now. His new sense told him that Nick was responsible for this tropical storm, but the mere mortal was not ready to face the source of his craving that was abruptly so close he could almost touch it.

"Hey, are you all right?" Gerard led him to a couch in a hallway. "Everyone who doesn't know a girl-by -choice wonders what they're like. There's nothing wrong with being curious."

Dean was about to protest the other man's interpretation of his flushing face when he saw the accountant eyeing the hand he'd unconsciously moved to hide his erection. "You don't understand. I'm not. There's this—woman—I hooked up with and I can't stop thinking about her. It's kind of unusual for me, to be honest, to be this hung up on someone. She's a real siren, a knockout." Who had to be a few yards a away.

His voice faded off as he felt the intimacy he'd shared with Nick—Nicola—beating upon his senses. His throat was tight. "Please come rescue me from this awkward moment," he pleaded mentally. No matter what form she was in, he didn't care—he'd ask her to turn into the girl of his dreams and everything would be, it would be—

Gerard's voice was sounding somewhere far away. Dean heard a crinkle and turned towards the sound. "What is that? I could really go for a mint."

"Blueberry," Gerard said in his friendly way.

Dean bent double with a sudden cramp. His mind reeling, he was staring at the foil wrapper that had landed at his feet—a condom packet.

"There's been some mistake," the hunter mumbled as he tried to extricate himself from a situation he should have seen coming a mile away. He was not attracted to this guy—to any guy! Some pit of wrongness began sprouting in his stomach, and then

_Whoosh_

The passion he had found with the siren over a month ago was in full flower.

"Try it and see," Gerard was saying as Dean stared transfixed at the condom in his hand. "You're excited, I'm excited. That's how it all starts between anyone."

No. It's one thing to be getting off so hard with a supernatural entity that you stop thinking about who's hunting who, but I don't want—

The more vehemently Dean's mind protested that he wanted to be halfway down the block, he was lashed with an arousal that he could swear was not his own.

"You've been turning this X-ray vision on me all evening and this bi-curious thing you've got going on has got my curiosity piqued, Dean," Gerard was saying. "You come off as totally inexperienced and yet not, you dress like you never look in a mirror, you're a badass who can't look me in the eyes, and I can't figure it out." He gently tugged on the packet Dean's fingers had automatically picked up from the floor and treated the paralyzed hunter to being on the wrong end of the condom application process.

No. Not this, was Dean's thought, but somehow his resistance was stoking this fire that felt exactly as though Nick—NICOLA—was watching and getting off hard on the sight of Dean's lips parting….

But they were alone, Dean tried to comfort himself as his lips closed on the man's member. "You seem to have some idea of what you're doing there, so maybe it was all an act," Gerard's voice came from very far away.

Yes, Dean had briefly been on his knees during his one-night-stand of being mostly in other positions. But by then Nick had him totally melted into a puddle of yes, and he'd eagerly absorbed whatever innovation Nick had inserted into—things—after that.

_No—"yes"—No—"yes"_

His consciousness twanging like a rubber band, Dean's body could not resist. Since he couldn't run, he comforted himself with the idea that he was going to give the single most miserable blowjob in history and prove once and for all that he wasn't gay. This was the sort of reasoning that had compelled him into the arms of every harlot he could get his hands on since Bedford, Iowa. He'd sincerely gotten off with those chicks, though more because he was picturing the hottie his siren would be wearing the next time they met up. He was collecting the best specimens of femininity, a luscious set of hips here, a perfect set of breasts there, so that they would all be at the forefront of his consciousness the next time Nick scanned him or whatever these sirens do to see what you desire the most.

All the while, the steady bobbing motion of Dean's head moving back and forth mirrored the recoil of his consciousness as it moved from

_No_

To some appreciative witnessing yes that felt more like Nick than ever, closer than ever, hot against his face.

Dean almost choked. Scratch that. There were witnesses to this humiliating moment, all right.

"Maybe deep-throating is a little advanced, so take it easy, babe. But if you've really not done this before, you're a natural," Gerard was looking down on him, flushed-faced and appreciative, and then saw where Dean's eyes were pointed. "Don't mind Maurice. He has to have something to do, but he won't join in unless asked. Oh, the look on your face. It's precious!"

The intruding member was back in place and the man was too far gone to check the power of his climax slamming drily into Dean's gullet.

No, Dean struggled to articulate, but all his muscles came un-knotted at once with a clear image of what he looked like being taken by a stranger who was 100% hu-man, and the ox-like bouncer pleasuring himself while watching.

It was hot. On some objective level, to someone of a certain taste, the scene was hot, Dean was sure anyone would have to admit that, the way he could admit that Strawberry Quik smelled good though the taste always seemed off to him. The new strawberry taste was filling him along with the impressive totality of the bounder wearing a berry-flavored prophylactic.

This guy was built like a Mack truck, and hairy, not at all his type. Wait a minute, neither of them were his type. Dean tried once more to still the engulfing motions his mouth was making, but the more he rebelled, the hotter the invisible presence got. Dean was forced to accept that he was going down on a tattooed bouncer with a couple of facial piercings and at least one more bit of metal where it shouldn't have been.

_Are you there? I'd do this for you in a minute, Nick, don't tell anyone, but being near you makes me melt like jelly. We can figure this thing out, but don't make me be like this with other people, with people watching._

Dean's eyes looked around the stranger's bulk to see the audience that was peeking out from the wings. There was something particularly humiliating about the dancers coming out and smirking at him under pounds of paint, a few of the making very un-ladylike moves under their dressing gowns.

_I'm sure that you came into my life for a reason, that we didn't kill each other for a reason. Let's go back to the motel and talk about thi_s, Dean bargained with the presence whose invisibility had stopped mattering at some point. He could swear he felt a hand twining in his hair and pushing him into a rhythm. All Dean cared about was trying to discern if it was an invisible male or female hand scorching into his scalp.

For some moments, everything was a rising crescendo of humiliation, and arousal until Dean made one final effort to wrench himself off his knees and succeeded just as the alien length gave a final thrust into midair.

"Call me? I'm here on Thursdays," he heard Gerard saying sincerely to his back as he stumbled out. Dean believed the guy, he thought as he emerged onto the blessed anonymity of a back street and sprinted towards their motel. Gerard was no exploiter; he was nothing more exotic than an attractive accountant who had a knack for the weird.

Dean was the one who brought the weird to that little party, he was sure of it. Belatedly, his hunter's instincts were back in charge and the elder Winchester's mind was clear for the first time in a month. Nothing was worth this kind of scene he'd just starred in. If he were into guys, Dean was able to see that he'd be into someone like Gerard, a clean-cut wholesome dude for whom racy was sneaking away from his friends to have a quickie. He would not be into a gluttonous beast that fed off people's lust. This was a venom flashback that had made him pine over a semi-immortal thing that had fucked up all his instincts at the same time it—

"This ends now. I don't care how sexy the mere thought of Nick can make me feel. Any entity that I hook up with does not get off on humiliating me, that's criterion number one, before anything else, including gender," Dean's rational mind was still throwing the occasional curve ball at him as he walked the last block to the motel.

He was confident he was finally righting himself after a tumble on the wrong side of the sheets. Hell, Sam thought his older brother had PTSD, so that's how Dean was going to file away this evening. These dominant-submissive games were for civilians who didn't know exactly how brutal life was.

Though he wanted to give himself a concussion to forget about what just happened, Dean's instincts reminded him that he only had a little while to accomplish the task that had formed in his mind on the way home. They were slated to leave town tomorrow morning, and Sam would show up eventually.

Dean let himself into a dark room and the taste in his mouth was suddenly so overwhelming he ran to the toilet. The blueberry, strawberry, and was that banana? Oh yes, the club manager had to come by at that moment and add his two cents—the flavors mixed into some stubbornly cheerful tutti frutti in his mouth and he dry-heaved a couple times before counteracting the taste with a swig from a bottle he had laying around. Then, ashamed, Dean gave in to the need to jack off that he'd only just been able to restrain at the club.

There was nothing he wanted more than to take a shower after that act, but Dean forced himself to act like the hunter he used to be and be something close to professional about this.

Sam had the car, but they had enough of the basics in the room for any half-decent hunter to perform a diagnostic.

Dean threw around salt, holy oil and holy water. He added in some of the herbs Bobby had sent under the guise of a demon-repellent, but which the elder brother knew were part of Sam's campaign to wash away the lingering taste of siren from both of their mouths. Especially Dean's, who had been on more intimate terms with the thing. He splashed a few drops of the phial of sailor's blood Sam was keeping on hand just in case, and then lit the ring of candles placed at the signal spots around the sigil he'd chalked on the floor.

Nothing.

Dean's heart panged back and forth a few times between relief and terror as he tilted the hand mirror this way and that.

Nothing on him glowed. Not a speck. Not his clothes, which he felt to be filthy with strange men's sex-smells. He couldn't find any astral fingerprint pointing the way to blame something for the events of tonight. But he'd felt the thing's hand. He was sure.

Sam came home to Dean in the middle of the circle, with every magical exorcising substance all over him and the surrounding floor.

"Stop looking at me like that," he snapped at his brother transfixed before him. "Come over here and give me a hand. I can't see if I've got a good coating of this holy oil on my back, and that must be what's messing with— "

Dean broke off, seeing that his brother was the one all aglow. From Ruby, no doubt. That his ritual was working, but offered no supernatural scapegoat for himself, only made the older brother more furious at his brother for having evidently spent the night rolling in demon goo. "Look at you. I bet this is your fault. I'm so used to sitting in the car next to this demonic—whatever—wafting off of you. No wonder everything's all going to hell and I'm all discombobulated. Stop staring at me, I said!"

Sam had crept closer looking for all the world like he was about to give his brother some bizarre pamphlet about coping mechanisms for a mad urge to go gay while being completely miserable about it. The younger brother put his hand on the other man's shoulder when he stopped and sniffed the air. "Dude, have you been drinking strawberry daiquiris or something? You smell like you've been drinking fruit punch Kool-aid."

"I have not drunk anyone's Kool-aid, I'll have you know, Sam," Dean growled as his fist met his brother's head. "Whoever told you I would swallow that?!"

They had a knock-up-drag-down until the motel management threatened to call the cops. That was their cue to pack up on the double and run to the car before any authorities showed up.

Dean was exhausted at the effort required to relive last night and sagged against the door. The last thought that reached him before sleep was one he was unable to see the bad side of:

The siren was there. Just like he promised. Nick said we would meet up again and we did. There must be something going wrong to scramble things up between us, but I'm sure we can fix it.

And the very last idea before he lapsed into unconsciousness:

The tattoo.


	3. Chapter 3

"That's all the man Winchester said to you, Castiel: 'whatever'?" the Archangel Michael asked his operative.

"Yes, but it was less of a '_whateve_r' than a 'whatever," Castiel said, struggling to reproduce the human intonations he had such a hard time decoding himself. "We're still on point with what has been foretold by the prophet, but there's unmistakably a different flavor to Dean's insolence. I reiterated that we had work for him, and he scarcely had any attention for me. This leads me to believe that there is something new growing just under the surface of prophesy."

"That would be the breakthrough we need, brother, because having a destined vessel who refuses to play along is turning out to be rather inconvenient," the archangel said from the stately room in Heaven where he had called for this audience.

Castiel couldn't repress the thought of what the old Dean would have to say about the typical angelic understatement-in this case, "inconvenient" meant the armies of Hell triumphing over man and angel alike.

"Was there something else?" Michael asked in a bored tone. Like all of the other top leadership, he hadn't walked the earth in ages, or even left his secret quarters in Heaven lately for that matter. Cut off from direct intelligence like many a monarch before him, the lead angel was all too aware of his vulnerability, which he hid by an imperious manner. "You're the one who's so fascinated by the creatures. Was the spectacle of his surrender everything that Hell is saying it was? Come now, Castiel, I know you watched the entire thing—purely for scientific reasons, of course."

The Angel Castiel made a noncommittal noise at the provocation. He mouthed a random psalm and backed out of the chamber, bowing and scraping along the way. As was his habit, he went to a random big city and watched the people and the cars and the money-sex-death engage in the pitched battles against love and light that had been going on all along, as anyone except the most out-of-touch angels were aware.

He watched the apocalypse happen to a little girl who chased her pink balloon in front of a bus. Armageddon bloomed from the tiny starfish on the pavement, its limbs regenerating torn and bloody in screams from the mother's throat, the father's, the death licking across every face connected to someone who was still alive enough to see or hear or feel the horror that had always walked the earth.

And then there were those who kept walking as if nothing had happened. These were the enemy, not the bus or random loss or life's fragility or fate. Even more so than the demon he scented as it stopped its possessed feet long enough to lick its lips in obedience to some instinct that must have a place in things. Castiel murmured a hymn and nodded to the little girl's soul as it stood there, distracted from its upward trajectory by the angel who was quietly having an existential crisis on the sidewalk in Tokyo.

"Be at peace," he whispered to her. She went off to a rest that he was sure he must have felt at some time, but had slipped from his fingers the day he had grasped tight the shoulder belonging to Dean Winchester to raise the man from perdition.

Actually, it had not been all that sudden, Castiel told himself as he automatically separated the quick from the soon-to-be-dead in the subway tunnel, in a shopping district, in a noodle shop. It was impossible for the angel to sift through the last year and figure out how much was Dean's changes and how much was due to the angel's own evolution from observing a single human so closely.

The siren swung the waist-length hair that his mark of the evening had desired and climbed atop the short order cook gone slack with desire. It was too easy, drawing this one out of the crowd at the dance club du jour where the siren had taken up residence in an empty cage for an evening's hunt. The cook, whose name was Steve, had looked up at the woman with indistinct features bumping and grinding in the cage suspended above the dance floor, and boom, an Asian woman with long black hair and legs up to here and boobs out to there was born on the spot.

It was so easy that Nick wanted to cry while he went through the motions with his target. Being exclusively attracted to the male of the species had condemned the siren, whose original name was Nikanor, to taking on an eternity of fantasies as one-dimensional as the men whose life-force he stole to augment a his lifespan. The fact was, the androgynous being had already amassed so much life that the difference between its assured future and infinity was depressingly slim. Yet tonight would add a little bit more because his obsession compelled him to.

His hands grabbed the full breasts the victim's imagination had bequeathed him for that purpose, and Nikanor returned to his thoughts. He'd given up thinking long ago, so the act was bound to be uncomfortable.

Last town over, he'd been a hot stud for a guy-loving-guy, and that hadn't touched Nikanor any more than this ride with Steve was taking him places. The siren had not expected much of the commission he'd accepted from Hell, either. It was merely the act of a forward-thinking monster who was old enough to see which way the wind was blowing, and it had had a distinctive whiff of sulfur for a while now.

The man Dean had been rather entertaining, as it always was when Nikanor got someone whose heart's desire was the exact opposite of what his self-concept was prepared to accept. Compelling a straighter-than-thou guy to succumb to his unvoiced deep-voiced fantasies was a thrill. It's not like the modern age had invented macho. The Ancient Greeks with all their wars and well-hung male pantheon were all about the unconscious phallus-worship, Nikanor recalled.

The siren must have started losing control of the situation while in the process of snaring Winchester. Being an FBI agent was bit of a lark to begin with, not least he got to wear sensible shoes instead of the stilettos most men inflicted him with. They were pretending to watch the floor show, Nick remembered. Though by this time Dean was dividing his attention between Nick's country boy face and gauging the FBI man's strength with a warrior's sense. And Nikanor could have said from experience that that always the easiest thing to turn into some kind of dick-measuring contest that would soon need no excuse at all.

"I never talk with anyone like this," Winchester said. It was a platitude that usually represented the last sensible thing out of most men's mouths, but in this case, it was the beginning of the hunter's search to understand what was happening to him. "I see the worst side of this world and then some, but I tell you, Nick, it's the sheer loneliness that'll make me finally turn my gun on myself someday. I swear."

The pseudo-FBI agent forgot to say anything.

Dean laughed weakly. "Sorry. Guess that was a three-day-diet of alcohol and beer nuts talking."

"No, I'm, I feel that way sometimes myself," Nick said on impulse, the part of his brain in charge of knowing when a man was about to break coming up straight cherries. He pushed the dinging sound of the jackpot aside. "It's like I've been undercover so long I don't know who I am anymore—"

"Like you've subsisted on lies for so long you're terrified of the truth catching you out so you choke on it," Dean completed eagerly.

"I never let anyone see what's underneath my mask, don't know about you," Nick pursued.

"Naw, man, I'm all squishy dark insides at this point. I lose the attitude, there's nothing keeping me from running out on the sidewalk. If I wasn't so afraid of letting my—partner—down, I'd—" Dean broke off and shook his head.

"Habit is a terrible thing," Nick said, his sincere voice sounding strange to his own ears.

"Yeah, man, no lie," and the Winchester man had studied Nick's false features as if he were vaguely aware that there was a sentient being underneath the shape of his fantasy. "I'm glad we met, Nick," came the human's sincerity, the sound of which he also seemed to find unnerving.

For the next few moments they stole glances at each other from some pure, fumbling place that had opened up right in the middle of the single mothers, would-be actresses and future addicts slinging themselves around the pole with a stubborn will to live.

Or so Nikanor had imagined. It was pure chance that the man had expressed something remotely similar to the siren's well-hidden angst. But Nick knew from experience that it took very little, almost nothing-a cup size, blue eyes that seemed to flow on forever-in order to capture a man's fancy. Maybe sirens were more like humans than he'd thought.

Then, habit had proved stronger than Dean or his pursuer; Winchester had made some crack about a dancer because that was the easy thing to do, and Nikanor was easy incarnate. Skin-to-skin contact sealed the deal, and the siren enjoyed following Crowley's directions to reel Dean Winchester in and keep him distracted.

No human could withstand the potent intoxicants imparted in one touch from a siren, much less taking one to bed. But where normally Nikanor would have been suggesting someone for his mark to sacrifice in the name of their love, he had nothing to do this time but simply watch the warrior in his arms.

Dean was drugged out of his mind on endorphins, but his seducer was sure that at moments, a trained awareness was about to break through. Nikanor didn't know if the hunter had any idea how to kill the creature that had him handcuffed to the bed, but the siren almost hoped the man did. At this point, death was the only titillation left, had been for a long time. The ancient being considered that if there was someone he wanted to—what was the word this person used?-gank him, then maybe Nick wouldn't mind making himself vulnerable before this first one in a long time to make him feel understood.

Because Dean was completely aware of being in bed with a siren. That fact alone made whatever they were making closer to real by many degrees than what Nicanor had done with humans for centuries. It gave him a twinge in some long-dead place.

Of course, no such connection was ultimately made. The siren merely enjoyed taking another macho man down a peg. When he bent to the flushed ear and said, "Don't worry, baby, I'm not going to leave you. See you later on down the road, I promise," he was playing the role assigned to him by the Demon Crowley.

But there was something else hiding within the words. Nick was glad to be able to study this hunter further. And to be studied by him.

The siren took a break from these thoughts to suggest that his current prey kill a girlfriend somewhere so that they could be together forever. Then Nicanor left the man in a murderous puddle on the cheap mattress that had already sopped up worse from the cook's hamburger-scented nightly sweat.

Dean hadn't fought very successfully when Nicanor showed up to invisibly overwhelm the human's system once again. The proximity of the siren reactivated the poison, compelling the man to experience his worst fears on his knees before a stranger. Nick did find it rather amusing that the hunter had such a blind spot about his own predilections—a siren can only manifest the desires of his prey, and Agent Nick Monroe's ready male appearance had shown this Winchester to be swinging any which way but straight, deep down.

But for once, there was more to it. Was it that the hunter was so eager to please the siren, the creature who was bound to please others? Was it watching the man resisting the obedience to a physiological reaction that Nicanor could have assured him was completely involuntary? Or perhaps it came down to a word that he hadn't heard in centuries:

"No."

When you can make anyone do anything simply by grazing their skin, "yes" loses all meaning. But "no," now, "no" was personal. It was intimate. The negative was pure positive, to Nicanor's centuries-old ears. It meant he wasn't alone, even in this mercenary exercise of driving a man past his limit.

Dean's mind screaming "no" while he pleasured another man-and was ready to come without touching himself, he was so turned on—that was the first sign of backbone that Nicanor had been able to detect in a long time in the male of the species he'd been condemned to prey upon.

It was hot as hell, and the siren was caught in his own net, hardly able to wait until he saw Dean Winchester again. There was nothing that said he couldn't enjoy his work.

The angel watched the black vehicle heading east, now with the older brother gripping the wheel while his brother slept beside him. Castiel knew the younger Winchester was dreaming of the demon who was his lover and supplier of demon blood. The boys' destiny was happening as foreseen. But a glance at the footnotes to the scene revealed Dean's emotions were all in a riot, Cas thought with some sympathy.

All that Hell cared about their tawdry little plan was that the Winchesters' rock-solid bond was being chipped away by the potent toxins imparted by the siren, on the one hand, and demon-blood on the other. That much was pure physiology, and the angel ached to tell Dean so. That the man was being forced to face longings he'd managed to ignore his entire life was something Castiel had predicted where Crowley had not. The affection between the two boys was so strong that Dean had never had to look elsewhere for a caring male presence. But now Cas was watching the fissures working invisibly between the siblings, and he wished he could take back what he'd allowed to be set in motion.

It was heretical to even think it, but Castiel was not at all sure that Michael was going to be as key of a player in the apocalypse as everyone, especially the archangel, seemed to believe. What had Michael done in the last several millennia? Could he claim to have walked the streets, as Castiel was doing now, and struggled with knowing he could prevent some small part of the random violence and heartache. Had he restrained himself because he still believed in a big picture that no one had ever bothered to clue him into?

Cas sensed someone being knifed in a nearby alley and shook his head. He couldn't tell anymore if duty was the only thing keeping him going or the only thing holding him back, but he did know that he longed to talk to someone about it. One thing had been driven home by Castiel's assignment to find a way to push Dean into a more amenable posture before his intended archangel. He sensed the human's well-hidden disquiet as he kept up a brave front for his brother. Cas felt the man's despair to be very much like his own, though the angel had no ready store of sarcasm to dish out to mask it.

Castiel only watched a few moments of the Winchester man's humiliation in the clutches of the siren. The human he was closest to would never forgive Cas for watching him obey the endorphins overpowering his consciousness in the back of that bar. So the angel only paused long enough to make sure his assigned target was safe.

The cloaking methods employed by a lowly creature like a siren were obviously no match for an angel's vision, so Castiel did stay for some time watching the vermin pull Dean's strings. Cas could do something similar with his own energy, but he knew that what was coerced could never be genuine, and angels were unable to be fooled by any of the pretty lies humans so easily fell prey to.

Cas watched a breath, a twitch of the fingers on the part of the siren make Dean come undone—even while his conscience struggled against the sex act because he knew himself to be better than this. Sirens were loathsome monsters, incapable of knowing what a rare and noble human had been ensnared by their ancient tricks, Castiel thought, watching the thing watching Dean. The siren wasn't even as advanced as demons, who trucked in souls without ever being able to appreciate what a unique jewel each soul was. And the soul whose humiliation Cas was trying his best not to witness was not just any soul.

"He's special, and for his sake I wish heaven didn't think so," the angel thought, as he had many times before. Just what this human's unique quality entailed was beyond Castiel's ken. If they'd wanted someone capable of grasping what gave Dean's soul that particular quality, Heaven would have sent someone other than a warrior to observe him all this time. Cas had seen an opportunity to break down the hunter's resistance by letting a hell-sponsored plot come to pass, and the angelic operative had simply allowed it to happen. The way he'd let that unfortunate be gutted in an alley across the city.

But Castiel had to try much, much harder to check his impulse to intervene and heal Winchester's psychological pain, when the other person's blood ran out onto the pavement with barely a twinge from the angel.

Realizing his twinge in response to Dean had gone on so long as to need some other terminology, Castiel tore himself away from the memory of the scene he'd not intended to watch in the first place. Cas chalked it up to a sense of duty. He forced himself to listen to the many-throated notes of suffering coming from the big city. He hummed a hymn that wouldn't register in the multitude's ears as it would his own, but then, even a warrior like Cas needed peace sometimes, as well.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean

"Not our finest hour," Dean said, grunting with the strain as he passed the plastic bag full of ice over to his equally wounded brother. Dean settled for the healing touch of vodka to soothe the throb in his budding black eye. "You zigged when I zagged. Either these demons are getting smarter or we're getting dumber."

"I don't know, Dean. We held our own until we could track down the mall's PA system and exorcise everybody. I'll never forget you lobbing salt-encrusted pretzels at the black-eyed old mall-walkers. A shopping center is going to be a tactical nightmare no matter what, and demons are designed to trip people up."

"I guess," Dean muttered, and the two brothers lapsed into an uncomfortable silence as they waited for their pizza to be delivered to their motel room. Each Winchester was hoping that the other hadn't seen what he'd seen today.

Sam had seen crowds of demon-possessed people leaking the blood he liked so much it scared him. He didn't want to tell his brother, but Sam was almost sure he could've exorcised the shopping center, floor by floor, on his own this evening. If he could've concentrated with all that delicious demon-fuel flowing everywhere, he might've tried it.

Whereas Dean had to try and fight while everyone from the little sneaker-wearing old ladies to the sullen teenagers were all giving the universal pantomime for "blowjob," no matter where he looked.

"How can they know? Was there a demon watching when I-?" was where Dean's brain kept getting stuck, and reliving his moment of shame was a powerful distraction from the hunt.

"You're enjoying this fight a little too much," a possessed guy said from the pretzel stand Dean had commandeered.

"I'll never say no to beating a little demon ass," the hunter grunted.

"I hear it goes the other way around," the demon purred.

A pure rage overcame Dean and he started throwing pretzels and anything else handy at the black-eyed onslaught. "Being forced to do something doesn't mean I liked it!"

"Actually, I hear you put the 'M' in S & M," a possessed granny taunted him. "It's nothing to be ashamed of."

Dean held his corner of the food court as best he could until Sam could get the exorcism going, but the whole time he was trying to figure out how to ask his brother if Sam had talked about the handcuffs portion of his time with the siren, without actually talking about having been tied up by a dude on purpose.

"Pass the bottle, man," he heard Sam saying in their motel room.

"Jeez, who do you have to screw in this town to get a damn pizza? It was the one food group I didn't have to use as a projectile today, and I'm starving," Dean complained.

"I'm going to get more ice. Don't eat the whole thing if it comes while I'm gone," Sam advised him.

Sure enough, the knock came at the door soon afterward.

"It's about damn time," Dean said as he opened the door on—

An all-American-looking guy holding a pizza and wearing a polo shirt and… hot pants?

"You!" Dean exclaimed and threw a punch before the siren-toxin made him think better of it.

"Dean! He's human! Hold on!" Sam came around the corner and broke up the fistfight. "Why is he not wearing any pants?" He examined the shirt of the man he was holding out of his brother's reach. "Rocket Pizza?"

"I thought rocket meant fast, not the kind in your pocket," Dean protested. "Their yellow pages ad didn't mention that you get a side of huevos rancheros with your meal," he glanced away from the spandex that left nothing to the imagination.

"We haven't talked about it, but if this is your way of broaching the subject," Sam began.

"You owe me $20 bucks," the pizza guy said to Dean with a dazzling smile.

"And you owe me an explanation—for this—" Dean made a pained gesture to the man's outfit, "And, and everything!"

"You want to do that here, or someplace more private?" the guy asked in a seductive tone.

"Someplace private, goddammit," Dean said to his brother's surprise, and Sam was left holding the pizza.

"I freaking pray to see you again so I can reassure myself you have complete control over me with your siren powers, and this is how you show up?" Dean exploded as soon as the two had walked across the parking lot.

"My appearance is all on you, Dean," Nick said. "Though I thought you wouldn't approve of the real pizza guy's Hyundai, and stole something more to your taste." He opened the door of the classic Mustang. "There's beer in the cooler. I thought we could take a drive."

Dean cracked open a can and let the cool savor slide down his throat. "I'm about 80% Jello by now, so why not drink myself the rest of the way?" he reasoned. "As long as you keep your hands to yourself, I have a few questions for you."

Nick finished wriggling into a pair of jeans and started the engine. "Thanks. I feel better already," his passenger said. "I guess your name isn't Nick."

"Nick will do just fine. How've you been, Dean?" Nick asked with a smile.

"I had a ton of things I wanted to yell at you about, only I can't remember them right now," Dean said languidly. "But I was going to say some things, believe you me." They drove in silence for a while. He turned slowly to see where they were getting off the main road. "Please tell me you're not taking me to make-out point."

"No, I wanted to make you feel like we were really alone so you could ask what was on your mind," Nick said in a way that seemed totally sympathetic.

"Why didn't you ask me to kill? Why have you come back around? And don't lie and say you weren't in St. Louis."

Nick seemed at a loss for words and he reached for his own beer. He took a swig and shrugged. "You're interesting."

"I bet you say that to all the guys," Dean scoffed. "How am I supposed to sit here, knowing you're just going to say exactly what I want you to say?"

"You want me to say that I'm stringing you along as part of a day's work, but why is that easier than believing the alternative?" Nick asked.

"Answering a question with a question is not what I want to hear: that's fucking obnoxious," Dean countered. "Unless what I actually want is some random dude who claims to know my innermost desires annoying the hell out of me. That must place me in the schmuck of all schmucks category of the poor saps you deal with."

"That's not how I would put it," Nick said softly, and they sat drinking without talking for some minutes.

Dean turned on the radio. Eventually Nick retrieved a sack of sandwiches from the back seat and they ate.

"You're not going to molest me?" Dean asked finally.

"Do you want me to?" Nick asked.

"If I could convince you to put on a hot chick as an outfit, I might change my mind," Dean said hopefully.

"Moment of truth. I have zero control over my appearance," the siren said.

"So if I had some serious kink, you'd be forced to play along?"

"It's not all non-stop glamor in my line of work," Nick grimaced.

"That sucks for you," Dean shuddered. "But you're really a lady, right? Sirens are chicks; everyone knows that."

"You're asking what I'd put on my driver's license? I've been either gender interchangeably for so many centuries that the question is moot at this point," Nick said.

"How old are you?" Dean inquired, knowing he was going to be skeeved out by the answer.

"I don't remember," Nick said simply. "Which means I'm very, very old."

"So you must be all gnarly looking underneath that quarterback exterior," Dean pressed.

"The reality is even more sinister, I'm afraid. I've been so many things that I'm nothing. There is barely enough of an 'I' to answer your questions, Dean. I'm more sure about this," he thumbed the spandex shorts up over the top of the jeans, "than I am about me."

"That sounds like a pretty grim row to hoe," Dean said. "If you weren't killing people and feeding off their life force, I'd say we should get together to complain about our fates more often."

"I'm trying to cut down," Nick spread his hands and shrugged.

"But you're saying that because some tiny part of me wishes that I could, in clear conscience, get with a real babe who makes me feel like this," Dean said through gritted teeth and with a flushed face. He crumpled a can and reached for another. "You could push my buttons straight into overdrive like you did the first time. Why aren't you doing what you're programmed to do?"

"I guess there's enough of a me left to try an experiment." The hand was an inch away from Dean's shoulder. "You're a mass of tension after a long day. I could give you a back rub. You could keep your eyes closed."

"Oh," Dean groaned. "That sounds pretty good. But no. You worked your siren mojo on me and I was down on my knees in front of strange dudes, two of whom I wouldn't even give the time of day to normally."

"And the third?" Nick asked with a smile. "You have to see the resemblance." He turned on the interior light to reveal someone who looked very much like Gerard, the fresh-faced redhead who brought a taste of blueberry to his mouth.

Dean groaned. "There is simply no way that I enjoyed that experience at all. If you hadn't been flexing your superpowers near me, I would've been out the door."

"If you say so," Nick said. "If I ever knew anything, it's been forgotten in all the airheaded vixens I've taken on since then. What men say about liking something above the neck isn't true, in my experience."

"I never was the top of the class, myself," the hunter responded, clanking his can with the siren's. "You know Nick, I kind of know what you mean about not having much of yourself left. At this point, I'm a mean son of a bitch because I don't see much on the other side of stubborn. If I didn't do the exact opposite of what the powers that be want me to do, I wouldn't have anything to live for."

"True survivors have to be pried off the ledge finger by finger," the siren said. "You might still drop into my lap."

Dean shut his eyes and opened them again. "Everything in me wants to say yes, but—no. Something's turning my Ms. Right into Mr. Wrong." A half-remembered idea floated through the alcohol haze. "I had a theory about that."

They talked for a while longer, finishing the beers and going out—in opposite directions—to relieve themselves before heading back.

Dean was just zipping up when the hair stood up on his arms. He turned slowly. "Dammit, Cas, I hope you haven't been standing there long."

The angel blinked. "I wished to speak to you a moment."

"But I," Dean figured it was best not to hear what heaven thought about his spending the last couple hours with a siren without actively trying to gank the thing. "All right."

"Er, I wanted to say, that is, we have work for you."

"I know." Dean gazed at the angel in front of him. "You expect me to say yes all of a sudden? You should know me by now, Cas. I'm going to keep playing hard to get because I'm an angel-tease like that."

There was a long silence. He and Cas stared at each other for a moment and then they were somewhere entirely different.

"Where are we?" the human demanded looking around. "Is this the Eiffel tower?"

"Yes, well, you've not had much of a chance to see the world, and I thought you'd be interested."

"Yeah, I guess since the world is about to end, why not?" Dean said wearily.

"You're tired," Cas said gently. "You would be more comfortable in your bed."

"Whatever," Dean said, and he was back in the motel.

"Dude, where have you been?" Sam demanded.

"I was out with Cas. He grabbed me up to show me the Eiffel tower for some reason," Dean said. "I don't know either. Ask his department for a hall pass or something. I'm beat."

Sam waited until his brother was securely asleep and then he reached for his laptop. He needed a lot less sleep these days, but he didn't want to hear the endless nagging from his brother about why that was so. A steady diet of demon blood was making his thinking clearer than it had ever been. He was growing into a razor-sharp sense of what he needed to do, versus what was a waste of time. He pulled up some of the links Bobby had been sending him with some of the more obscure translations of Biblical texts. Time was running out, and they needed to spend every minute they could on figuring out how to stop it.

Sam glanced over at his brother's bed. Who knew what the angels had in mind about Paris—there was no hope in getting any solid intelligence from them. But Dean—he was obviously having some sort of post-siren aftermath, and he wanted to be sympathetic, but, well, the timing could have been better. Sam wished he could recommend his own solution to the doubts and doldrums he would be experiencing in the run-up to the apocalypse, sans the mother's little helper Ruby was so helpful in supplying.

Any lingering concern about his brother quickly faded away as Sam read far into the night.

Castiel returned to Paris and tried to imagine what Dean Winchester would say about the rest of the city he'd not had a chance to show him. He'd asked someone where humans liked to go and was told that everyone wanted to go to Paris, if only to complain about it afterwards.

The angel felt unsettled. He would truthfully be able to tell his superiors that he had spent some time examining the Winchester man. Dean would have a ready alibi for the time he'd spent with that siren creature. Everyone was happy.

Except the angel was not sure why he was helping cover for the human who was evidently falling for the siren according to plan. "Yes, the siren is slowly melting away Dean's natural mistrust. Yes, he is becoming more receptive without being aware of it. When the time comes, he will say yes," Cas rehearsed in preparation for his audience with the Archangel Michael.

Only some carefully hidden part of the angel hoped that the opposite was true. "Everything in his life has made it impossible for him to receive affection," Castiel told himself. "He deserves a few moments of privacy in which to determine what he would want before the end of days makes it all unimportant."

Cas resisted the urge to look in on the Winchester man's dreams. After all, he was trying to protect the human's privacy, not brazenly interfere, as Michael would have him do.

In the dream, Dean was sitting next to Agent Nick Monroe in the girlie joint in Iowa, but they weren't paying attention to the dancers.

"We could be anywhere," Nick said with that comfortable smile.

"I know, but I think I'm afraid to see where that anywhere is," Dean replied with far more assurance than his words would indicate.

"Where would you like to be?" he asked after a moment.

Nick looked surprised. "No one has asked me that in a very long time. I suppose that means that I'd like to be here."

This touched Dean for some reason. To cover his emotion he looked to the stage. The dancers were a combination of men, women and in-between people of all varieties of attractive.

They meant nothing to him.

"Nick?" he said.

"Yeah?"

Dean turned towards the down-home drawl. "You can really be anything anyone wants?"

A slight sadness flitted behind the eyes. Dean was proud to see it there. "Yes. What do you need me to be?"

"I'll tell you." Dean leaned towards the ear, and as his lips confided in it he was thinking, "The ear has to be the single most androgynous point on the human body." And so it didn't matter he'd barely grazed the pink whorled flesh while he spoke his plan.

"I don't think I'm that good," Nick protested.

"I beg to differ," Dean whispered.

"Dean? Dean!" Sam exclaimed.

Dean awoke feeling wonderful.

"Um, ahem," Sam was pointedly looking across the room over Dean's head. "I would have said, get a room, but we have a room. One room. Do you think you can save your sexual frustrations for the shower like a civilized person?"

Dean snapped his mouth shut from where he'd awoken in mid-ejaculatory moan. He'd been about to tell his brother his new anti-apocalypse plan. But on second thought, now that he was really awake he thought better of it.

"I'm only human, Sam. There's no two ways about it."

After his brother went off to the shower, Sam briefly wondered if humanity were indeed so simple. Then he returned to his laptop for more study of the scriptures.


	5. Chapter 5

"So Bobby, what's the diagnosis?" Dean urged his uncle from the center of the sigil where he'd endured the unspeakable for the last hour. Several kinds of consecrated oil, blood from animals he didn't want to think about, sand from the Holy Land, graveyard dirt, most of the contents of Bobby's "controlled substance and/or spice cabinet"—it was a price Dean was willing to pay in the name of getting better.

Bobby shook his head and Dean's heart sank. "I hate to break it to you, kid, but I got nothin'." He held up his filthy hands to his nephew's protest. "I know, I was hoping to find something 'cause at least we'd have a prayer to fix it. This is one for the books: siren toxin doesn't have to hurt you, or make you hurt somebody."

Dean caught the damp towel and wiped off the worst of what coated him and sat on a wooden chair, suddenly dejected. "I guess Sam was right: this was a waste of time."

"Now let's not get ahead of ourselves," Bobby said from the kitchen. "You know me, Dean—I'm not going to hover you to death. Once this thing happened I trusted you to deal with it as you saw fit. But now that you're here, you don't get away without a talk." He came back with a plate of cold fried chicken and a couple beers.

Dean, who'd had to fast for all the spellwork, was suddenly ravenous. He ate, trying to think of what he wanted to say, and when the older man fixed him with a down-to-business look, Dean took a deep breath.

"I'm glad you didn't find anything wrong with my astral body or whatever, but I think the problem is on my body." He caught the well-controlled concern in Bobby's eyes and rushed to add, "not like that. Here, I'm going to tell it to you as clear as I've been able to figure out.

"The siren's mojo is invincible. Any human being who gets near it, or has been near it, the poison short-circuits all but the part of your brain that says 'more.'"

"Sam and me may be basically clueless about feelings, and we'd never blame you for being attacked," Bobby faltered.

"I know this for sure because I saw it—or rather felt it, again." Bobby's concern was much more obvious at this news. "No, I don't know why the siren came back to find me at this club. But both times, man, I was miserable at the same time."

"Like possessed people say they don't have control of their bodies, like that?" Bobby pressed.

"Really close to it, except—and you can get Sam's take on this—you're ready to sell your first-born to keep the good times coming."

"Sounds like a paradox," Bobby said, bringing out the good liquor to mark the occasion.

"That's exactly what it is," Dean leaned forward. "And you want another one?" Bobby made a beckoning gesture with his hand. "I'm almost glad that—thing—happened to me, because it showed me which end was up, so to speak," he faltered at his listener's incredulity. "I know what I _don't _want, Bobby. I don't want people making decisions for me, using me for their own sick purposes. Angels, demons, who the fuck ever. I, Dean Winchester, am through pleasing anybody else. I'm fighting this apocalypse my way, and if your path and Sam's cross mine, then the more the merrier. But I'm riding out the end times the way that makes sense to me. Doing the exact opposite of what got me put in Hell to break that seal can't help but be an improvement."

Embarrassed at his long speech before his notoriously sarcastic uncle, Dean took a drink in preparation for the backlash from Bobby.

To his surprise, the other man said, "Dean, I can't tell you how glad I am to hear that. I didn't want to say anything with you being all PTSD from everything, but, you look damn good, son. Hell, I'll say it. You look great," and his uncle washed away the unusual emotion of the moment.

"I do?" Dean was totally thrown. "The next thing I was going to segue into was how my whole problem is that I get off on being miserable, and I think it's something with the tattoo."

True to form, Bobby was not at all fazed by a summary of Dean's ideas formulated over the last few weeks, though of course he didn't say he'd discussed them with the siren him- itself. Basically, Dean started looking into the sigil he and Sam had had tattooed on them to keep them safe from demonic possession. They assumed it worked, because neither of them was possessed, but all they did was get a sigil from some book and use themselves as guinea pigs. Who knew if they did it wrong, or if the sign only worked for certain creatures?

"Guess we can say for sure the thing's not effective against sirens," Bobby said in his typical understatement. "But I don't get what this has to do with your being hell-bent on misery, which I'm not qualified to judge, though your Dad had a way about him."

"The siren trip is supposed to be hearts and flowers and buxom babes," Dean replied, and then forced himself to say, "I didn't get my sultry chick. Which either means that I get off on not getting what I want, or that I'm able to fight against the good vibrations to some extent because I'm a miserable bastard—giving me the paralyzed in my own body feeling."

"So what you're saying is, you want to figure out what the kink is in the works so you can a) get the night with a beautiful woman you have coming to you, or b) become totally immune to the thing, and you don't much care which."

Dean knit his brow for a moment. "Yeah, Bobby, I guess that's exactly it." He shot a concerned look at his uncle, who appeared to be deep in thought.

Sure enough, the old man's face brightened. "I know somebody that can help you with both aspects of your problem."

"You do?" Dean was suddenly cautious of a solution that seemed to be too good to be true.

"Oh hell no," he burst out when he and his uncle got out of their cars and Bobby walked him into the so-called tattoo parlor the next county over.

"Everything's sterile," the overall-wearing man said, emerging from a back room. "That on the floor there is from my last ritual. I don't draw and quarter a sheep and keep it around for decoration."

"I know you're on the up-and-up, Rex, but Dean here can't trust because he's emotionally unavailable or something."

"Then you've come to the right place," Rex smiled, revealing a mess of crooked teeth. "I been practicing spiritual tattooing for over 20 years now."

"And how's that goin' for you?" Dean snarked, taking in the random shapes and words covering the man's body.

"I bet you I'm protected from every beastie you can think of, and probably a few you can't," Rex said with the same good humor. "Now show the doc what we're working with here."

Dean shot an anxious glance at his uncle. "I'll just mosey on back to the ranch. You give me a call if you need me, boy," Bobby said.

For the next two hours, all Dean could think of was how he wished he'd known the tattoo artist/shaman/butcher his entire life.

The man had some kind of wonderful, matter-of-fact way of talking about more lore than Dean had heard from anyone except his dad and his uncle. "I had a bad back, couldn't take as many licks as the rest," he said while doing his own diagnostic spells over Dean, and especially his tattoo. "Settled here 'cause the energy felt right. And people bring the weird to me."

Dean poured out as much of his anguish about his siren encounter and the apocalypse as he thought prudent, sure that his hillbilly diagnostician could fill in the blanks. Rex was all business underneath the country manner, and together they decided there was no way to tell which of the scenarios Dean presented were actually happening without spilling some ink.

By this time, the autoclave out back that Rex insisted upon showing his patient didn't matter anymore. Dean was simply concerned about getting permanently inked with a sigil that was exactly the wrong thing to carry around.

"Henna is probably wise for starters, son, but you'll need to make it permanent eventually."

"I'll go some place and have them trace over it, if it seems to be working," Dean said.

Rex shook his head. "Not to be conceited, but you get the full shebang here at Rex's Tattoo Emporium. We're gonna do a ritual and embed that aura, so to speak, into your skin. Ain't no strip mall joint up to providing that kind of service."

And that's exactly what the most-time butcher did. Dean didn't even know what was happening most of the time, but braziers glowed brighter and doves were sacrificed and all he know was he felt very dizzy. So that by the time Rex started applying the smelly paste, Dean was past caring what part of his body was in the line of fire. This was definitely not like his first experience under the gun. That time, of course, involved a lot more pain, but Dean almost felt like he was on a hallucinogen, from how intensely he felt each layer of henna.

"You sure you didn't use a needle after all?" he slurred when Rex was standing over him with a critical air.

"No, boy, look." Rex hauled him up out of the chair and Dean saw what had been done to him.

The original tattoo over his heart had been elaborated after the tattooist clucked his tongue over certain imprecisions. It's hard to believe that it was only henna, because the effect was to make the sigil into an antique carving, complete with depth and character. Both of his arms had bands around them made up of symbols from traditions Dean didn't even recognize. And the last piece was a line of arabesques below his navel, which completed the effect that led Dean to whistle, "I look hot."

Rex laughed. "I might be one of the few to see through that badass act you keep up, so maybe some self-esteem is part of what you need."

Dean was already putting on his clothes. "Wait! Are you steady to drive? Before you leave I need to perform another diagnostic."

"I got the diagnostic taken care of, Rex. Thanks," Dean said, emptying his wallet on the way out. "Think I've got one of those tattoo highs but I'm steady to drive. I'll keep you posted on how this works."

The tattoo artist swept up after the treatment, relatively sure he knew Dean's next stop, but too much of a professional to let on when he next called Bobby Singer.

Dean sent a text message and began to drive. By the time he arrived in Sioux City, Iowa, some of the endorphin high had worn off. Dean was glad to be trying this out with a clear head.

It was getting dark but he could have oriented himself with his eyes closed. That much hadn't changed. "Oh man," Dean said, distracted for a moment by the beautiful specimen of tail-finned T-Bird the siren was driving. "That's what I call beautiful." Dean's face fell as he recognized the body he knew as Agent Nick Monroe. "And that's not. Strike one for our tattoo plan," he muttered.

"Hey Dean, how ya been," Nick was saying in that comfortable way, so comfortably that Dean was meeting his outstretched hand to shake it before he gave it another thought.

"And?" the siren inquired about the skin-to-skin contact.

"And nothing," Dean said after a moment. "I mean, being near you makes me feel amazing still, but I didn't just have the impulse to sell my first born."

Nick enveloped the hunter in a hug.

"Hey! I just said I wasn't into being with you like that!" Dean protested.

"That's wonderful!" the siren said. "Pardon me," and he wiped away a tear.

"Turning on the waterworks at the drop of a hat means you must be a chick in there!" the human said hopefully. "But you can't turn off this mirror of truth thing you have going on, man?"

"So you concede that this body is what you really want?" Nick seemed to have recovered his poise.

"Look, no, we don't have time for this. We're going to get a motel room, throw up some heavy duty privacy mojo, and discuss strategy." Nick fell in line behind the hunter before the latter whirled on him. "Are you doing all this because I want you to, or because you want to?"

The siren used his powers to get them a room without any bothersome payment required. "Wouldn't mind traveling with someone that has those kind of skills," the hunter said in admiration. They closed the door and he was totally in charge for some moments as he used old and new techniques to seal their room from prying eyes and ears on all planes.

When he was finally done he turned to the creature. "Well? Are you going to answer my question?"

"There are a lot of things I could be doing right now, but I'm being pushed around by an ill-tempered human who didn't even have the grace to show me his new tattoos first thing. Draw from that what you will."

Dean's face lit up. "Oh yeah, they look pretty sexy, if you ask me." He stripped off his shirt and they gazed together at his new figure in the mirror. "Am I wrong?"

"No," Nick said. "Both fetching and effective, apparently." His voice had a note of disappointment.

"No offense, Nick, man, but you're still a dude. So not as effective as I'd like. I was hoping this would get you on the wavelength with my fantasies. This shaman guy said it's something to do with my heart, so you can see he did a lot of work there and it's still not quite right. The other three are about will and decisiveness."

"Three?" the siren inquired. "I only count two more in addition to the chest piece."

The hunter blushed. "It's a small one below the belt, no big deal."

Nick went very still. "I don't want to coerce you. That's not what this is about."

Dean felt the other's arousal beating at him like a pair of wings resolved not to take flight. "Oh all right, this whole exercise is to see if I we can be civilized enough together to fight together." He unbuttoned his jeans and showed the trail of symbols that connected his navel with his short hairs. "It's nothing, I told you."

Their eyes met. "It doesn't mean anything," Dean said after a moment. They didn't need to specify that he was referring to his obvious arousal. "I've worked through worse, and this is important."

Late into the night the siren and the human talked, Dean sharing his hope that Nick's powers could be the secret weapon for confusing Heaven and Hell.

"I've never reflected the desires of anyone but humans, and then, I go for the low-hanging fruit," Nick objected. "I didn't mean you, but I don't want you to put all your hopes in me if I'm not able to consistently morph into what, say, angels want to see. Demons, I've seen from time to time, but angels—that sounds way out of my league."

"Start with the demons, then. They're the unpredictable ones," Dean said.

At some point they'd broken out the drink mixings Nick had in his trunk. "Does a bartender license come along with the siren deal?" Dean asked, somewhat unnerved by the prospect of drinking something that wasn't a pure manly beverage.

"Where do you think I've spent most of my existence, if not bars?" Nick said. "That's the net result of my almost-eternity. Try it, if you don't like it, we switch to scotch."

"Actually that hits the spot," Dean admitted of the tonic and something. "As I was saying, we need to find a controlled way for you to practice. However you became what you are, Nick practice has to have an awful lot to do with it. You'll be like this demented fairy godmother granting all these wishes people don't want to admit to. A trickster, sort of."

They came up with various scenarios designed to throw a monkey wrench in the apocalyptic mechanism already in motion. At a few points, Dean was listening to what he had to admit were some good strategies from his counterpart, when he caught Nick becoming self-conscious about what he was saying.

"If it wasn't a good idea, I'd say so," the human finally said. "Hunting doesn't leave any time for sparing people's feelings. I say we try it out."

"Why are you willing to risk everything on a monster?" Nick asked suddenly.

"Things were pretty dismal before I met you, and at least us here," he pointed back and forth, "this is something nobody expected. If you turn traitor on me, Hell and Heaven still want my ass, but for different purposes, none of which would be very easy on me. If things are going to suck, they're going to suck on my terms from now on."

"About that. I'm sorry about overwhelming you with my power to the point you would…." Nick trailed off. "That night in the club. I tracked you there and then encouraged you to try it out because most people need a little push to act out their fantasies. I thought you would enjoy it. Really, I did."

Dean sighed. "If it was chicks, I might have." Then he switched tack. "If these tattoos helped tone down your siren juice enough that we were able to have a sensible conversation tonight, maybe I can go back and get another one that will make you look like a babe."

"Where would you want another tattoo?" Nick asked. "I've had a few in my day, depending on whether the man is into that sort of thing."

"Really? Where have you had them?" Dean asked excitedly.

"I had a beautiful Asian backpiece a few times," the siren recalled. "Once I had these swirls on my upper thighs going down to my knees."

"That sounds hot," Dean reflected, feeling like the constant tug of arousal he'd been pushing back in his mind was all right to succumb to now.

"If I may," the siren lifted a finger, "I think you should get a symmetrical design over your shoulders that curves over your collarbone." He traced an inch away from Dean's skin.

"If you were a babe, I'd like to see you with something curving around your stomach, like this," Dean pointed.

"What else?" Nick smiled.

"Those bands that chicks get around their thighs, I've always thought that was hot for girls with really long legs," Dean was full into his fantasies by now.

"What else?" Nick asked in his comfortable voice.

For some minutes, they traded tattoo fantasies until Dean was quite unnaturally unbuttoning his jeans. He froze.

"Talking about a girl while pleasuring yourself is a time-honored heterosexual pursuit," the siren said gently. "You won't lose points for giving in to what must have been quite a struggle this evening. I can feel your draw on me like you can feel my presence on you."

Dean leaned gratefully into his task. Then he stopped. "Is there—anything I can do for you that doesn't involve, you know—"

"You could take off your shirt."

The hunter hastily stripped to the waist and resumed his actions. With his eyes closed and the siren nearby he was having an electrifying wank. He opened one eye. "You're just going to sit there?"

"Is there another alternative?" Nick asked with great patience.

Dean struggled for the words. "I thought you got off on the violence, more than the sex."

"When you're exclusively around people who treat you as a sex object, the sex isn't very fulfilling," Nicanor said wryly.

The hunter felt a pang of guilt. "All right. You stay on your bed, I'll stay here. Don't say anything. To each his own."

By now, he'd totally lost hold of his original fantasy. He stroked himself with one eye half-open and trained on the siren, who seemed to be enjoying himself a great deal simply by looking at the shirtless hunter. Suddenly the siren's climax made his intoxicating presence ten times as delicious. Whether he liked it or not, Dean was coming along with the smiling Nick Monroe.

The two sank back on their respective pillows for a long moment. Nick opened his mouth.

"So help me, if you ask me whether it was good for me too, when it was against my will, I'll—"

Nick replaced his clothes. "I need some air. I don't sleep, exactly, you know."

He left, not to return that night.

The siren drove the stolen car to the nearby graveyard, where Crowley was waiting for him.

"I guess I don't need your report," the demon said, sniffing delicately. "You reek of sex and Winchester. I could see that he put up some heavy-duty wards for privacy, so I imagined he was up to no good with you."

"Most men don't want to be caught in their pleasures," Nick shrugged.

"Did he say anything between 'please, please, more, more'?" the demon asked.

"This is one screwed up guy. Full of self-loathing. He can't stop talking about himself, but not in any useful way."

"Did he mention his brother?"

"No, actually. Not once this evening," Nick replied.

"That alone is worth the investment in you," the demon said, swatting the siren on his behind. "Dean and I apparently share a certain taste." He stopped with a meaningful look. "I can amend the contract if that's what it takes."

"I'll throw one in as a good-faith gesture," Nick said. He performed the gestures—surprisingly vanilla gestures-required of him by Crowley in a patch of grass behind a monument. For the first time in a long time, he was proud of what he was doing. Demons were notorious for their ability to sniff out lies, and yet this one hadn't seemed to note everything that Nick omitted from his retelling of his evening with Dean.

It wasn't a perfect night by far, but it was the best evening the siren had had in a long time.

He left the demon behind and found a good place to dream. Because even monsters dream. Nick dreamt of new tattoo placements on the body whose proximity made his own skin sing.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The siren melted into the crowd, waiting for the next loose tentacle of desire to lend him a shape for a while. With much time and practice Nick had learned to block out all but the strongest lust or emotional need in his environment, but he vaguely remembered a long-ago past in which he'd been completely subject to the fantasies of each person who walked by. This quick succession of bodies with just the right come-on phrases welling to their lips had been terribly confusing, and he was sure that if he did have a personal history, it was fractured and lost during this period of madness in which he had been more prey than predator.

Today, Nicanor could retain the last form he had assumed with someone for several hours if he concentrated. Thus, he had been able to carry the shape of Dean's desire to his meeting with Crowley. Being talked to like someone with a brain for the first time in ages had the siren analyzing that last interesting tryst with the demon and comparing it to the previous occasion on which he had talked with Crowley, right after reeling in Dean with the FBI agent form. He supposed that as the hunter was treating his more like a person, Nick was beginning to pass muster as a human.

Crowley had proved himself to want very little in the way of pyrotechnics when they coupled. A few "yeah babys" and whimpers of pleasure on his part had done it. But Nick had noticed that the demon leader was sniffing something avidly, which he assumed was the remnants of eau de Winchester that had rubbed off after spending an evening with Dean.

But no. It must have been the illusion of a soul. Demons could smell them.

Of course, demons were covetous of souls because they represented wealth for their domain. But Nicanor, the perfect lay, had learned a new trick: reflecting the soul that demons found so arousing. He wondered what Dean would say if this proved a reliable skill. "Treating a monster like a person may be very useful for your apocalypse"?

He'd better not tell him, Nick reflected. Dean was liable to become self-conscious of their friendship (the siren used that word sometimes privately to himself and he didn't want the man to dismiss it as his own fantasy) and stop enjoying their beer and strategy sessions. The best way Nick knew to keep spending time with the Winchester man was to keep being useful. And he was curious to see if he could replicate his success with more demons.

Thinking it a bad idea to make the Nick Monroe figure more well known in demonic circles, the siren went off to find more demons by reverting into a generalized shadow-shape, one that drew no attention from passersby until the crucial moment. There was no sense in getting drawn into some lonely man's geisha fantasy when he had a mission to do. A smile played around his almost-transparent lips. He wasn't kidding when he told Dean there was nothing left of him now, nothing but what appeared to be a smudge when he walked by the display windows in downtown Philadelphia.

What he had learned from his instructive roll in the hay with the Demon Crowley led him to some of the area churches, but since it wasn't a Sunday there weren't too many people about. His steps wandered to a more run-down section of town where there was a storefront that had been taken over as a a church-run charity store. Pure-looking young women were taking turns staffing a bake sale/rummage sale or minding a pen of children, while other passed out pious literature to the occasional person who wandered in looking for a deal on a used pair of shoes.

Of course. This was not consecrated ground, but it was crawling with young mothers and virgins wearing floral dresses and their hair in a long, gleaming cascade down their backs. Seventh-Day Adventists? Nick couldn't keep track of how many sects he'd seen through the years, but he couldn't remember whether he'd ever become one of these Noxzema-pure girls that he now saw reflected back at himself through the shop window. He turned when he felt the knife in his back.

"Shouldn't have wandered off in his neighborhood, sweetie," the demon's nose was poking into his hair as insistently as the knife. "Let's say we have our own little prayer circle in private."

Nick was allowing himself to be led into a network of alleyways while the requisite protests came out of his creamy white throat.

"You lured one out! And thought you could have her all to yourself?" Another demon popped up. "I was the one who found that dump with all the chicks."

"This one looks like she's so starved for it she wouldn't mind getting a crash course," the first demon said. "But I get the first go."

To the rising crescendo of protests from Nick, the events were taking their course, with the second demon and soon a third sniffing his provisional soul all the while. Since the siren had spent centuries on his back, his mind was free to analyze why things were going so well.

He'd seen demons in the past, but they'd always been hard to fix on. But now that he was engaging with more than one, he understood why. It was rare for anyone to have similar fantasies, hence the siren had embodied what Dean truly wanted and Agent Nick Monroe only registered as friend material for his brother. But the demons were content with so little. Someone in a Sunday dress and a rather plain, freckled face that they could draw into the alley and make scream while they assaulted her again and again, not even considering why she wouldn't try to get away—they didn't even need Nick to say any of the affectionate phrases even the most basic human required. Nicanor's demonic assailants were one-note and happy to share with each other. "Let's try this! Maybe she'll do it like that!'

It was positively easy to affect a swarm of these lower-echelon types, although the siren imagined that someone like Crowley was far to worldly to be taken in that easily, he was sure. Nevertheless, it was a success, and he couldn't wait to tell Dean so.

He didn't think about what Dean might be doing at this moment, though the siren had started tracing a parallel path to the hunter's as the latter followed the call of his work. It felt so wonderful to have a reason to be in one place rather than anyplace, to have someone to meet up with, to have news that he was sure would make someone happy—that the siren didn't think how odd it would be to surprise Dean with a new face.

"Dean! It went like clockwork!"

Dean barely alighted the church-lady features of the person distracting him. "I'm sorry ma'am, I don't think we know each other, but I have this previous engagement." The hunter's eyes were busy scanning one of several outlets to a network of warehouses, heedless of the flush that the siren's presence was causing him. "This is not a safe neighborhood, trust me." He made to dash off.

"Dean," Nick said, grabbing his arm. "It's me," his sunshiney young girl's voice said as if it hadn't been screaming during an assault a short while before.

"Oh crap, don't sneak up on me like that," Dean turned. "And I'm a little busy."

"I thought you wanted me to be a woman," Nick said, somewhat disappointed by the cold shoulder.

"Sorry, I don't have a Laura Ingalls Wilder fetish. I can't lust after someone who makes me think missionary and not even missionary position in the sack. This is really not the greatest time, Nick, can we explore my sexual issues when I'm not hunting a mean ghost?"

As they fell into the conversational rhythm the two were developing together, Nick found himself morphing most naturally into the FBI agent form he usually wore around Dean. "Better?"

Dean's head snapped back from the loading docks he was surveilling. "Why are Holly Hobby and all-American gay hero the only two choices I have to work with?" he grumbled. "I have something to take care of, besides."

"I'll come with you," Nicanor had volunteered, and then crashing sounds had come from inside one of the abandoned buildings and Dean was too distracted to tell him no.

It was a nasty ghost that had taken up residence in the warehouse district long ago. The information Dean relayed as they ran through the empty structures told the siren that the spirit had gotten a recent influx of juice and ideas from some teenagers who had taken to creating their own pseudo-Satanic rituals with dismembered baby dolls and other toys, black candles and the like.

"This ghost thing has more or less free passage through any warehouse in the area from the sewers, and it's decided to get its kicks sabotaging shipments going out through the working warehouses." Dean grunted as the two cleared some capsized boxes. "I've heard about kids getting razor blades in their candy or metal objects in their toys, but nobody figured out that everything had been stored in a facility in this part of Philadelphia."

"Why would a ghost go to all this trouble?" Nick asked.

"You should know better than anyone, man. What people want makes no sense sometimes. See if you can short-circuit our target with your mojo."

They discovered there wasn't much that a siren, specifically, could do in a haunting. But with him wearing an FBI agent suit, Nick was able to help out making salt lines and even using the rock salt shot gun.

"You're pretty good at that," Dean said in approval. "Were you some kind of shotgun toting babe a la Lara Croft?" he asked hopefully.

"I've been on a few hunting trips," Nicanor answered. Dean groaned. "And don't discount how much a soldier fantasizes while in battle."

"I get the idea. You think you can handle covering that door while I—"

Dean vaulted into action after the ghost began knocking over boxes in all directions.

Nick was merely being what Dean what he wanted—a reliable partner —but the siren was finding it especially easy to be an excellent backup. He was already so in sync with the hunter after their previous contact and with the toxin reactivated in Dean's blood. He caught a smile playing at the corner of the Winchester man's lips at points while they were taking out the ghost and his nest.

"You were pretty impressive back there," Dean panted. "Having your siren juice nearby made me not afraid or something. I actually had a good time."

It was an early summer day that was turning into a warm night, so Dean stripped off his shirt and wiped his face with it. "Don't know what you like to do after a fight, but I like to get fed, get plastered and get laid, not necessarily in that order."

Nick had taken his shirt off as well. He merely smiled and shook his head. "I'm game for whatever."

He followed Dean to the Impala. "You were pretty good yourself. I liked how you planned out how all those boxes were going to fall. And watching you stomp on all those baby doll parts he'd been collecting was sick, man."

The two laughed and got in the car. They sat there with the doors open so they could take turns pouring bottled water over their heads to wash off the dust and grime, Dean talking nonstop about the higher points of Nick's contributions to that evening's hunt.

"Where to? Did you leave a car around here?" Dean asked.

"I can't believe you managed to get anything done with you watching me so closely," the siren risked.

"Come on. We already said nothing means anything because it's your juice affecting me. Let's get a beer." They closed the doors.

"That's what a lot of men have to tell themselves," Nick's comfortable voice said.

"Put your damn shirt on," his companions returned, laughing. "If you're going to hunt with me, you can't psychoanalyze me. That's why Sam and I fought."

After a silence, Nicanor said, "Those tattoos look lighter."

"I need to get them touched up or done for good. I've been holding out hope that you would turn into a chick." Then Dean said eagerly. "If you could hold on to someone's purity ring fantasy from earlier today, what if you came back from being a stripper?"

"It won't end well," Nick grimaced. "Besides, these topless bars are very difficult for me to keep my focus in."

As they drove, he gave Dean a summary of his time playing an extra in a horror movie starring several demons. Dean was enthusiastic, but the siren could tell he was more focused on other matters.

They found a strip club and in no time at all, Nick took on one of the fantasies floating in the air—bosom spilling out of a too-small white halter top, a tiny white miniskirt with a fringe, white fringed boots.

"You've got a tramp stamp," Dean hissed. The man whose fantasy Nick had taken on was ogling him and moving in for the cheesy pick up line.

The siren had to focus on ignoring Dean's desire burning next to him, but of course the middle-aged man who'd created this buxom lady would have no eyes for anyone else.

"Can I, do you want a, I mean, what's your name?" the mark stammered.

"Serena," the word came out of his mouth without his having to think, as Nick had gotten by mostly without thought for so many years. The guy grabbed the siren's hand and pressed his lips to the back of the hand in an unexpected show of gallantry.

"Back off, man, she's my date for the night," Dean snapped.

"You back off, jerk, I saw her first."

Both men were intoxicated by Nicanor's venom, so it was a more even match than perhaps the hunter expected. Still, Dean threw some punches and overpowered the other man, dragging out the siren, who appreciated this show of gallantry even more.

They ran into a dark shadow. Nicanor melted into the hunter's arms. His lips parted to meet the human's avid mouth. His fingers tugged open Dean's fly and were working hard to excite him as quickly as possible while the man groaned in the way that Nick longed to hear.

"Oh oh oh." Men didn't tend to last long in his arms, Nick thought ruefully, but still he would remember this little tryst for a long time.

As would Dean.

"Ah man," he panted. "Can't you hold onto Barbie instead of turning back into Ken at exactly the wrong time?" he swore. "Another 60 seconds and I wouldn't ever have felt stubble scraping across my cheek while I came."

"I've got a few things going on that Ken doesn't," Nick said softly into Dean's ear as he zipped the man back up.

Dean wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand. "The clothes and everything?"

"Yes. Otherwise going from lover boy in there to meeting a guy like you would have me in this body and a miniskirt. Not a good look."

"Whatever." Dean didn't want to take on the "guy like you" crack. "I'm tired. Let's get a room. Not like that."

"I can get us two rooms if you like," the siren whispered, still flush from his stolen moment of pseudo-intimacy.

"Nah. I really did appreciate having someone with me today. When Sam and I decided to part ways I didn't think about how hard it is to hunt by yourself. If you wouldn't mind hanging around while I got some shut-eye, I could sure use the rest without having one eye opened all the time."

"Of course." Nick would feel useful in any way Dean needed, he decided as he charmed them into takeout food and a room for the night, no plastic necessary.

Dean fell asleep in the other bed. It was all the contentment that the siren could ask for.

Eventually Nick did start to feel cooped up in the motel room, so he decided to get some air. He carefully stepped over the ring of salt and other precautions he'd watched the hunter lay down before sleep, and stepped out into the night.

He walked a little farther than planned when he was surprised to hear, "Dean?"

Nicanor scanned his surroundings, looking for the sleeping hunter he'd just abandoned, when his body turned on its own towards the irresistible call of someone's desire.

"Dean, I thought you were asleep," the man in the raincoat with his tie all askew said in a gravelly voice.

Except he wasn't a man.

"I was, but you know I'm no choir boy, Cas: sleep doesn't come or stay easy these days," Dean's voice came out of the siren's mouth.

His instincts took over, mouthing the banter that Cas would expect to come from Dean, while Nicanor considered that he had somehow managed to mirror an angel's desires. And that Dean needn't have worried—he had an angel watching over his sleep.

"Are you sure you're not tired?" Cas asked anxiously, peering at the human.

"I don't need beauty sleep," Dean said with the smallest trace of flirtation.

The angel fussed with his tie. "Then would you like to go on an excursion with me?" He took Dean's silence to be misgiving. "I thought you would be interested in a piece of my past, so to speak."

The next thing Nick knew, he was in the Sistine Chapel in the early morning hours. Having never been snatched up by an angel before, he was thrown of his stride, but this Cas that Dean had described to him as almost monosyllabic seemed happy to describe the various scenes decorating the surfaces.

Suddenly the two of them were floating up at the ceiling, the angel keeping the human aloft with the support of one finger.

"Damn, Cas, give a shout before you yank the ground out from underneath me," Dean complained. "What am I looking at?"

The angel pointed to a face in the background of one of the frescoes. "That's me." He hastened to add, "That's not the face you've seen me wear, but my vessel at the time."

"Really? That's so cool," Nick's enthusiasm added to the automatic interest Dean was displaying. "You just met up with Michelangelo and he said, 'You seem pretty cool. Let me put you on my ceiling'?"

"He did that quite often. Many of the faces you see are workmen and other humble persons he enlisted. But Heaven decided that his work deserved our support, and so some of us were sent to put ourselves in line for being models. It was thought that having real angels as subjects added something to his already considerable talents for envisioning the otherworldly."

"Wasn't Michelangelo into dudes?" Dean's mouth asked.

Cas stopped. "I suppose he had certain interests. We angels never cared about that sort of thing. I could go into the history behind that understanding, but—'

They were now back on the ground. "People will be coming in soon," Cas said. "Would you like me to take you back?"

"Other than the apocalypse, I don't have any hot dates," Dean said, and Nick noted again the touch of nerves from the angel. "What's good for breakfast in this town?"

Cas walked Dean through the still mostly deserted streets, where they scattered pigeons and the occasional clergy with their steps. They sat down at a small streetside café and Dean moaned over the fresh bread and complained about the small size of the coffee until he tasted it.

"So they just sent you to pose for Michelangelo and that was it?" Nick had no trouble making Dean's voice say.

The angel's eyes turned opaque. "I was on a—mission."

The two of them watched the streets coming alive around them for some time in silence. "It's beautiful here, Cas. Thanks. I get mostly ugly in my line of work, but it's nice to remember there's still good in the world," both the angel and the human he was standing in for said the line sincerely. Nick wasn't sure that Dean would have been able to see the light come into the angel's eyes at the idea that he had done something to please the irascible man, that they had shared something, but the siren saw it quite clearly.

Cas returned the human to his car parked outside the motel. It was a nice trip they'd had together. The angel had an ambivalent history with the section of the world that housed the Sistine Chapel, but he merely wanted to show Dean what it was to be a part of history—not just through the angel who was his (Cas used the word friend to himself, though he would never voice it aloud in any language) charge, but by virtue of the role Dean Winchester was to play in the apocalypse.

What that role was, Castiel was no longer sure of. Dean wasn't making all of his predicted moves, and Heaven was divided over whether that meant Michael's intended vessel was moving closer to his assigned role or not.

The angel couldn't resist one last look, and sure enough he saw the man stirring in his bed and heard him utter the syllable, "Nick?"

Just then the loathsome siren came through the door with coffee. "'Morning, sleeping beauty. What's on the agenda for today?" the easy voice drawled.

The angel watched Dean fall into easy banter with the monster dressed as a man. At some point Dean would need to see exactly what kind of a lowly being he'd been bedding, but from what he could tell, the human hadn't fallen in love with his seducer yet, and Castiel's orders had been unmistakable: "When the man has surrendered body and soul, Michael will step in and inhabit his vessel."

Cas watched the two figures discussing hunting strategies for a little while longer. Dean missed Sam, even he could see that. Whether this siren was taking the right tack by trying to fill that void, he wasn't sure. The human, at least, seemed able to forget that he had been ravished by this thing whose calculating glances seemed totally lost on the hunter, though the angel saw them very well.

At least they had their beautiful morning in the square with the pigeons, Cas consoled himself. There were some things that a debased entity like a siren could never understand.

Nick sat in the passenger's seat and used only a small part of attention to keep up his end of a conversation about Dean's beloved music. He'd been trying to be himself, as much of a self as he had, with Dean. He wanted his time with the human to be real usually, but Nicanor needed time to think.

How long would it be before Castiel realized his visit to the Sistine Chapel had not been with Dean Winchester? Would the angel be able to assimilate the concept that he desired Dean with something more than professional zeal? And would he decide to exterminate the siren his angel powers could discover readily once he looked beyond the illusion of a soul Nick reflected?

These were extremely pressing concerns, ones that should have had Nick's well-honed self-preservation instinct clanging at his attention.

But instead, the siren thought of 16th century Rome.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Castiel was sure to be called for another audience with Michael, but he chose to hide in a little-frequented sector of Heaven so his thoughts would calm themselves in time. So he went to the area that housed some of the angels who, unlike the soldier-angels, were more talented in what amounted to statistical analysis.

"Hello, brother," one said, "We don't see you down here very often."

"It's been a while, Raziel," Cas admitted. "I'm not here on official business. More to get a change of scenery."

"Our humble home is yours," another angel whose name might be Uzzara said with a welcoming gesture of her arm. "I always say this is the calmest place in heaven, next to the gardens, even with the unusual activity these days." She responded to the inquiring glance from Cas. "With everything going on, the higher-ups have been asking for reports."

The visitor perched on a balustrade running all around the large space containing Heaven's data processors. The click-clack of the abacuses and other computational devices along with the scratching into wax tablets was very soothing. Every once in a while someone would unconsciously hum the first few bars of a psalm, and the tune would be taken up instantly by the scores of brothers and sisters dedicating their eternity to figuring out the likelihood of various scenarios. Castiel wasn't sure when the rest of heaven stopped being so homey, but he was gripped by an intense nostalgia for a moment.

The prophesy area, with its direct line to the earth's prophets, was always heavily trafficked and sometimes the subject of a brief purge when the upper management didn't like what was being foreseen. But the analysis sector, by contrast, received no visitors or outside information. Yet the reports no one usually read often revealed them to be more accurate than the prophesy-angels'.

"Don't ask me, brother, because I don't know," Uzzara said warmly. "I can only give you a rundown of several likely scenarios, but things are changing all the time, Castiel."

The angel in question started a little from where he was sitting. "They'd let you give me that information?" Cas asked. Nobody ever told him anything, much less state secrets.

"No," Uzzara said with a crafty smile as she took some notes with her eyes on her abacus. "But you might benefit from knowing the question I'm referring to."

The statistician beckoned for him to come closer and she pointed to the heading on the page covered with figures. Castiel sat there, stunned for some time, his thoughts inevitably going back to Italy-not the brief trip he'd made with Dean, but the mission he'd referred to while showing the human the Sistine Chapel.

He hadn't had much time to tell Dean the full story of that 16th century sojourn in Europe, but Cas had no intention of discussing much about the only time he'd managed to nudge heavenly politics in the direction he wanted them to go.

"This human is different," he had told his superiors in the early 16th century.

"They're all different in the same way, I find," Rafael had drawled. "Are you saying we should smite him?"

Completely ignoring humans or smiting them to death were not truly the only two alternatives available to angels at the time. This was an era when Europe was deeply spiritual in a way the earth might never be again. (Cas was aware of the other heavenly departments in charge of other divine stories, but he'd always had his hands full dealing with the Occidental-Christian tale). But then there was no place better than Italy to go to be reminded of an immanent God, where a saint's name was on every person's lips, where poor and rich alike were never without their engraving of the Madonna and a chip of bone supposed to come from a minor saint could fetch a price higher than gold.

And angels did go to be reminded. As they had for a long time, Heaven's functionaries looked to the devotion of humans for something that rekindled their flagging belief in a God they'd misplaced at some point. Often they smote the humans who threw themselves into an enthusiasm for some new face of a God who had supposedly stopped showing himself—out of pure jealousy, it might have been. But then, Cas was not the only angel to have observed that some of the innovations initially persecuted on earth somehow made their way into heaven, to console angels craving a purpose for their maneuvers.

Castiel had been sent on official business to Italy. Considered the least imaginative operative handy, his superiors sent him to check out the many devotional cults in the area, to see if they were covers for some other type of belief. There was a handful of artists in particular who were thought to be suspect. Being sent to untangle Italian spiritual art from its pagan roots was an impossible task, and the pointlessness of it had Cas fuming for some time.

Until he met the irritable Florentine with the magic touch.

"You're looking for the best sacred artist? You must go to see _Il divino_," someone told him. Scandalized that any human would be called divine, Castiel invisibly observed this Michelangelo, who was mostly engaged in sculpture. Anyone nearby was likely to be eviscerated by the young man's sharp tongue, but his hands. His hands were capable of creating such lifelike sculptures that Cas found himself thinking a few blasphemous thoughts himself about how this must have been what it was like watching his own Father at work creating the earth.

"If you're going to stand there and gawk, you're going to pay for the privilege," Michelangelo shot over his shoulder without turning around. Castiel was startled to hear the sculptor bark this out late one evening when his model and helpers had all gone home. The only person he could be talking to was Cas.

The angel stepped out of a shadow. "I was merely curious to see you work."

The sculptor gauged his observer. "Do I owe you money?" The angel stared at him. "If you're from that bastard Fulvio, tell him I won't make anything for that whorehouse of his, no matter how much he's offering." The artist still got no reaction. "Do you have some other job for me? I'll be available in two months, most likely."

"I wanted to see if the devil was behind your skill," Castiel blurted before he could stop himself. The man snorted. "But I may have a job for you after all. What do you think of Heaven?"

"If you're looking for a philosopher, look no farther than the nearest tavern," the sculptor quipped. "Look, I have things to do, and honestly, I don't have any idea how I do it. But I won't make anything as long you stand there bothering me."

"But this is inspired!" Cas ran his fingers lightly over an unfinished hand emerging out of stone and then transitioned, "You are in grave danger." He was abruptly terrified of one of his brothers finding out and smiting this genius simply for being more in touch with their vanished Father than they had been for a long time.

"Come now," the artist said, taking a mouthful of wine from a skin hanging on a hook nearby. "Any artist worth his salt is too busy chasing after his own muse to actually make good on any threats against me. I have a talent for dispatching anyone else." Michelangelo paused. "Why are you here?"

Castiel's mind had been working rapidly. "I do have a job for you, as it turns out. You'll hear from me." And at that he had vanished.

It had taken the angel some time to put the Sistine Chapel opportunity together, but it happened in the blink of an eye from an angel's perspective. Part of the preparation involved buttering up his fellow angels with the idea that they would be depicted within frescoes telling the stories that they still told each other about their hidden Lord. Their borrowed vessel-faces would be there forever in a sacred human space where people's prayers would always be floating up towards an increasingly skeptical heaven.

All the while, this Michelangelo had protected status, in addition to an angel making sure regular work came his way. That the man lived for an unusually long life, given his era and occupation, was one of Castiel's greatest achievements.

The other, he was less proud of.

"You are the devil, aren't you?" the artist asked him once during one of Castiel's not-infrequent stops to the studio the angel found reason to make through the years. "A woman came here with a message from 'my friend' but she wasn't herself, somehow. It was you. And you are the same person who I met that night in my studio, years ago. I've known this whole time, in a way." The man went calmly back to his work.

The angel was taken aback yet again in the presence of this human. "How can you see that?" He was more nervous for this man's fate than ever. Angels didn't like to be seen in their earthly dealings.

Michelangelo put down his tools. "You know those doors they have in some cafes, the ones that swing like this?" He pivoted his hands back and forth. "That's the way I'm built. Things going in and out all the time, so I can see that in other people too. Everyone else, a thing is what it is. Life is simpler for them, I think. You, you're not so simple, either." He picked up his tools again.

Castiel was flustered but plunged ahead with the news that had taken so much careful planning. "Though I know you prefer sculpture, I want you to take a painting commission that is coming your way," Cas had said, and then waited for the man's objections to stop. "I will come and visit you, not wearing this aspect, but I will be there. And some—friends—of mine will come as well. People like me. There will be much for you to discover for your work."

The man considered and then nodded. "I had wanted to ask you to pose but I thought someone who steals to me like a thief in the night might not like to be immortalized in stone. For someone of many faces, it would be wrong somehow."

Cas remembered smiling at that. "That's the first time you smiled!" the artist remarked. "Your serious face is what made me think you probably weren't the devil, because everyone knows he's full of pretty lies."

"You don't smile easily yourself," Castiel said. "And the beauty you make is not a lie. I'll send word."

The work began, and the angels duly brought their vessels to be painted by the master. Castiel put off his appearance, however. Instead, he had hung around the human whenever he could, invisibly watching him create. The man often directed a glance or two in Cas's direction, or, if he was alone, sometimes the painter talked to the angel, whom he called "_il diavolo"_ as a joke. Cas had never had a nickname before. In return, Cas whispered to the artist, who had developed some facility with hearing his angelic voice, about some of the gossip in Heaven. While he didn't name names so that the human didn't get himself into trouble, he described whatever angel was coming for his portrait the next day, and then the two of them laughed at the layers of the eternal and venal that Michelangelo was able to fuse into the ceiling.

The sarcastic artist had someone to accompany his many hours spent flat on his back. Cas liked having a friend so much it scared him. But he was able to pull off the enormous fresco depicting many angel-inhabited models in Biblical scenes, and thereby save the mortal's genius for posterity, and that's all that mattered. Well, and that he was able to be near the artist while he was doing it.

"I've put you in because you've made no sign you'll appear and sit for me," Michelangelo said conversationally to the warm empty space next to him. "I trust the likeness is good enough?"

Cas peered at the small figure who was an exact replica of the first vessel he'd worn to meet the painter. "It's not you, but all of this is thanks to you," the artist gestured to the work. "So you haven't escaped my brush after all."

When the task was done, Cas thought it was best to leave the artist to his work, rather than overloading his delicate senses with angelic energy at every turn. Perhaps the man would spend more time around other people without Cas there distracting him. The angel had gone to see the human once, in a weak moment, to gently suggest that he should suffer fools a little better and then he might have more people in his life. This last time he'd gone there wearing a lady in her mid-forties, which, given the artist's proclivities, he thought was an inoffensive vessel to bring.

"You," the now-old man cried out. "Why have you not come to see me?"

"I've been aware of your progress," Castiel said lamely. "You have been productive and relatively healthy."

"Everyone else bothers me," the human whispered. "I've been lonely. For you. "

Totally unequal to the situation, Cas had soon fled. When he heard the news that the artist had developed an obsession in his old age—with a woman in her forties that looked remarkably like the vessel Cas had last worn.

"Michelangelo has fallen madly in love at this late date….for a woman!" was the gossip in Italy.

Cas had been unable to restrain himself and had gone to investigate, taking care not to get close enough to ruffle the painter's senses. No, he tracked the woman. Long enough to find out that she wasn't a woman.

It pained Castiel to no end that his artist who saw so much would be unable to see that he had fallen into the clutches of a siren. There was no mistake. Cas had watched the creature shift into a dozen forms on her way across a square to meet the elderly man. "If only I hadn't befriended the man, he wouldn't have—wanted my friendship so much that a siren could prey upon him," the angel lamented. There were ways to kill the vermin. He'd seen one or two hanging around artists over the centuries, for whatever reason. Perhaps the vain things liked to be depicted as something beautiful rather than the sucking vortices they were.

Cas thought of killing it, but he decided to let it move on, as they always did. And perhaps he told himself that while that brazen hussy was toying with his painter's emotions, she was getting closer than the angel had ever dared.

A bell tinkled in the statistical wing. "That's for you," Uzzara said sympathetically. "You look a little calmer. Have a psalm for the road." She began singing and the other statisticians quickly took up the tune.

The cheerful sound accompanied Cas as he went to his audience with the management.

"And how did you find Dean Winchester?" Michael asked.

"Notably more amenable," Cas said.

"So he's fallen in love with the filthy thing?" Raphael pressed.

The question threw Cas for a moment before he remembered what they were supposed to be talking about. "No, not at all. But they are on affectionate terms. There's no danger of his going back to his brother for the time being. The rest is sure to follow," he said neutrally.

"That in itself is an accomplishment. I must say, Castiel, how did you know this would play right into our hands?" Michael asked.

"I pay attention," was his answer.

"Keep it up, brother. Let anyone else do the tiresome wooing that humans require before saying the magic 'yes,'" the archangel ordered. A relieved Cas was ejected from the chamber.

Dean and Nick were burning up the highways, racking up more nasties ganked than Dean had ever managed before, even with Sam. The siren didn't sleep, for one thing, so their mileage increased. Dean had a little more verve to put into the fighting, courtesy of a nearby siren stimulating his senses. And Nick's ability to be what Dean most desired sometimes had him saying just the right thing to help crack a case, or, more than once, darting in between Dean and a projectile.

"If I were to shoot you, you wouldn't die?" the hunter had asked over and over.

"The few times I've connected with someone into snuff were not pleasant," Nick said. "Assuming you don't want me bloody, we should be good."

"Now I know why you're trying to say on my good side," Dean said at one motel room where he'd insisted on giving them both a break from a moving vehicle.

"Now I know why nothing ever gets through your thick head—you must have been knocked out plenty with this line of work," Nick said affectionately. "But really, how long will it take for you to realize I'm here because I want to be?"

"Because you think the apocalypse will cramp your style. Right," Dean said. "That's more likely than somebody choosing the hunter way of life."

"I have an exaggerated fear of my own mortality," the siren said softly. "And I don't think seeing all manner of disgusting things is too high a price to pay for being close to you."

"That's—a really nice compliment, I think," Dean said. "Look, let's watch a porno or two and then I'm hitting the hay."

They had done this a few times before. Dean was becoming accustomed to pleasuring himself in front of the siren, who didn't mind needing the cover of a pay-per-view movie, even if the movie reminded him of the two-dimensional characters he'd spent centuries playing for other humans.

"Things are different now," he told himself. "Dean is comfortable enough talking to me while we watch. It won't be long now." The butterflies-in-his stomach feeling was delightful, Nick thought. And not being sure if tonight was the night, every time they checked into a hotel was also more titillation than he'd felt in a while.

"Aw, man, can't you leave it for one second? I was getting into that," Dean griped from the next bed.

"What?"

"There's another guy that just jumped in the bed," Dean gestured. "I'm not into that."

"You chose the movie," Nick smiled.

Dean made an exasperated sound. "I didn't read the description carefully. Where's the damn remote?" He hunted around the bed, swearing.

His companion decided to take pity on him. "Look, Dean it's in your shoe." He reached to where Dean always shed a few layers of clothing between their beds. The siren's hand brushed against the hunter's, who had seen the remote at the same moment.

They had sustained some contact while fighting together, so this slight contact shouldn't have had any great effect. Nick had gotten used to the idea that he didn't have to watch himself so much around Dean.

But none of that seemed to matter, because Nick and Dean were all over each other for at least a couple minutes before either of them thought to pry himself off the other. Nick was the one doing the prying.

"Oh, one more second," Dean pleaded, running his lips over Nick's.

"The tattoo, it must be wearing off," the siren said, doing his best to disengage from the desire that was throttling him from the human.

"Exactly. This is all your fault," the hunter gasped. "I'll blame it on you tomorrow."

Nick had hoped for an experience that wouldn't be explained away later, but he felt his body being pulled into the actions Dean wanted to badly, though it was odd for him to be acknowledging it. "That's you talking now, Dean. You're going to freak out tomorrow if I take advantage of you now." He scooted to the other edge of the bed. "But I've been lusting after you for weeks, so it's kind of hard for me to say no. I should go take a walk."

The human nodded and they both sat, watching the action onscreen for lack of anything to say.

"How can I have been all into you a second ago, and totally not be into that?" Dean nodded at the two men having a stylized encounter on the screen.

"You've watched something like this before," Nick caught on. Dean blushed. "Have you ever really cared for a girl? I know you have." The hunter nodded. "Me, I've only watched people in love, but I can see they're not measuring each other's body parts with their eyes the way people are who are having sex with their fantasy. Dean, I've been more dream girl and boys than I can remember, and they're the farthest thing from love, believe me. With you, for some reason, I can pretend it's a little more than that." The tears came unbidden to his eyes and Nicanor hid his face. "Sorry, man, you complain about my venom affecting you, but people throw me for a loop, too."

"Hey," Dean was suddenly at the same end of the bed. He put his arm around the siren. "Look, I'm not an idiot. If you've been around half as long as you say, you've seen a hell of a lot of shit. Being a bad guy, or gal, isn't a cake walk." Nick opened his mouth and Dean held up his hand. "You've done some terrible things, maybe you deserve it. I haven't talked about it much, but I've done some horrible stuff myself."

The two of them talked into the early morning hours, taking turns sharing some of the bottled-up pain they felt, Dean about his stint in Hell, which inadvertently started the apocalypse, Nick about couples broken up and lives sacrificed for an eternity he had to intention of sharing with anyone.

"I think my body count will top yours, if I can't figure out something pretty quick that will turn this apocalypse around," Dean said miserably. "It's going to be me ridden by Michael pretty soon, so I should just get over it, right?"

"It doesn't have to go that way, you know?" Nick said softly. He sat there very quietly in the quiet moments when everyone in the motel had gotten themselves to sleep by whatever means it took. Any prostitutes had left. There were no cartoons for the children to put on. There were only two far-from-blameless people who happened to have male bodies, sitting next to each other on a garish bedspread while one of them slowly wrapped his mind around it all.

He turned at a glacial pace to regard the other person sitting very still next to him. Dean reached up and ran a hand across Nick's face. Not to rekindle the siren-fire that would excuse it all. But to observe the effect of his own touch upon the siren.

Something came alive in those eyes that never looked quite human. Not to Dean. They were watching from a place that was too patient. More like an angel's, came the thought, but the hunter was too busy watching something he eventually identified as hope. "You can't really feel like that about someone like me," he said. "Not knowing what you know now."

"Like what? Tell me what you see," Nick said from his relaxed posture.

"You look beautiful," Dean said. He saw the siren's mouth twist. "You must hear that a lot." He ran his hand down Nick's clothed arm. "There it is again and I didn't touch your skin. It's not like being with a chick, though."

"Nobody said it would be like being with a girl." Nick watched Dean's brain try to keep up.

Damn it all, Dean was curious. The few inches separating him from Nick spread out like the smooth surface of a lake. Dean could float across, as he had been allowing himself to be carried along with this whole siren deal. But he had decided sometime back that that was no longer good enough. He was making his own way, even if it was straight back to hell.

The hunter stared across the quiet lake between himself and this creature doubly unknown because he was both a man, and not a man. He reached out with both hands and drew the face to him. His mouth met the lips that were not like a woman's, and he explored the difference for long enough to be sure.

He made love to the person in bed with him, and it wasn't like being with anyone he'd ever been with. He was gentler because he knew how much Nick had been used before. It was rougher because he could be—all those moments fighting next to Nick Monroe had taught him that.

They rolled around laughing like children and growled like animals. Dean slid across the final inches of the body of water between him and his companion. Nick's lips parted and he gave a final challenging, vulnerable look before Dean reshaped the other with his explosion."

"You're going to take it all back tomorrow," the siren murmured inside the human's arms.

"We'll see," Dean said, comfortably drowsy.

He woke up and he felt the male contours wrapped around him and forced himself not to push Nick away. "I made my bed last night, and it was damn good. Not that I have to admit that to anyone, but I at least owe it to—him—not to make him feel like second-best again."

Still with his eyes closed, he traced his hands up the strong back and made it up to the stubbled jaw. It took a few misses but he finally closed his mouth on the other man, who was pushing him away for some reason.

Dean opened his eyes to a horrified—himself.

The two passed their terror back and forth for one long second.

"Holy shit. I do not have a thing for myself," Dean was scrambling to clothe himself while heaving. "You didn't look this way last night, tell me I didn't remember that wrong."

"No, I can explain," his other self said. And suddenly he was Nick again.

"I can't think of any explanation I'm going to like," the real Dean said.

Castiel decided to take a moment to check on Dean. He'd been avoiding him for the last few days, not wanting to see if things were progressing with that siren entity he was so close to. From far away it was apparent that the two were sharing a bed. Unable to restrain himself, he'd been crept closer to view the scene he wished he'd not helped to bring about.

Dean deserved so much more than to be lovingly entwined with a wraith. Cas had done everything he was expected to, and yet he felt that he'd done exactly the wrong thing. He hated thinking of Michael swooping in and claiming the human just as much as he loathed seeing Dean with the siren. He was trying to think of a way to halt what he had started when he saw the two men separate, and that both of them looked exactly the same.

"No," Cas whispered, adding his own horror to the two men's in that brief moment. Then he was gone.


End file.
